No Regrets (15 page)

Mamie, Ruth’s oldest sister, was fiercely loyal to her. Long after Rolf left, Mamie continued sending her concerned letters.

“I want you to know, my dear sister,” she wrote, “I love you very much. My heart goes out to you and I think of you most of the time... I am appalled at the things you have had to go through. I love you and pray for you and can only think of the good things you have done. You take care of yourself and remember ‘I love you.’”

It wasn’t surprising that Ray Clever’s phone calls to Mamie’s Ohio home elicited the same stony silence that he and Bob Keppel had encountered in Illinois. Mamie said she didn’t know anything at all about Rolf’s disappearance. She refused to answer any questions.

Ray Clever knew that Ruth was sending checks to Mamie.

There were still, thankfully, two very credible witnesses: Joy Stroup and Donna Smith, Mamie’s daughters. Joy was as concerned as Donna was about the phone calls they had both received from “Aunt Nettie Ruth” on August 8, 1980.

Joy told Ray Clever that she was at work that day, estimating that it was noon in Ohio (3:00
P.M
. in Washington State) when her aunt called her. They had a very brief conversation, not more than three minutes.

This was the most shocking recollection of all. This was the dread secret that had been hinted at when Joy’s letter came to the San Juan County detectives through the Pilots’ Association. This was the information that Joy and
Donna had given in the secret meeting in Seattle, long sealed now until the Attorney General’s Office team and the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department and Prosecutor Silverman were ready to move.

According to Joy, her aunt Ruth had contacted her in the summer of 1980 and told her that she had shot Rolf and burned his body.

If this shocking news was from anyone else, it surely would have been reported immediately, but Ruth was known for making outrageous phone calls when she was in her cups. Nobody paid much attention to them. Over the previous years, many of her calls had to do with her anger at Rolf, or some fight they had had. She was somewhat like the boy who cried “Wolf!” and it was hard to take her drunken phone calls seriously.

Besides, Ruth’s letters to her family were so typically those of a beloved—if slightly dotty—old aunt. She sent checks to her nieces, her sisters and brothers, and was always there for them.

They had all wanted to believe that basically Aunt Ruth had a good heart.

But her calls in August 1980 had been too explicit to dismiss. Joy Stroup told the investigators what Ruth had said to her. There was little question that Ruth had spoken of killing her husband. “I was very busy at work and I just told her I would call her later,” Joy said. “I didn’t want to believe what she was saying. I thought she had been drinking again.”

Two days went by before Ruth called Joy again, and over those forty-eight hours, Joy felt her first impression was right. Her aunt had been drunk and spouting nonsense as she often did. But then, on August 10, Ruth called again.

“She told me the same thing she did before.”

“Did she ever tell you that was all a big story—say it wasn’t true?” Clever asked.

“No.”

After the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department’s first search of the Neslund property in April 1981, Joy said Ruth had called her. “She wanted to know if I’d given a statement to the police,” Joy said, “and she said ‘Keep the confidences I have given you.’”

Joy and Donna had been concerned enough that their aunt might not be making her grisly story up that they set out to find Rolf Neslund and make sure he was safe. But they could not locate him. Ruth easily explained why. “She convinced us that he had gone to Norway and that she and Rolf were getting a divorce.”

The young women had wanted to believe Ruth, and she was very convincing when she told them there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Rolf was safe and well— but her marriage was over. Ruth had appeared to be very well off financially, and she was very kind and generous. She wasn’t grieving over the upcoming divorce, and seemed happy enough.

Still, as time passed, it struck Joy as strange that Rolf hadn’t taken his clothes with him when he left. “She offered to send his clothes to me for my husband,” Joy said. “They were about the same size.”

Later, when Joy mentioned to her aunt that her daughter was having trouble with a boyfriend who was “too persistent,” and Joy talked of her own plan to discourage him from bothering the teenager, Ruth said inscrutably, “I know a better way to get rid of him.”

After that phone call, Ruth’s words came back to worry Joy. What had she been trying to say? Joy hated to speculate
on the meaning intended. Donna Smith knew that her uncle was alive on August 7 because he called her house. She wasn’t home but he had a brief conversation with her babysitter, who was sixteen.

Joy told Donna about the two phone calls she had received from their aunt on August 8 and August 10, so Donna called Ruth on the eleventh. They exchanged pleasantries, and then Donna asked to talk to Rolf, explaining she was returning his call.

“He’s out,” Ruth said first, “but he should be back in a minute.”

When Donna didn’t hear his voice on the phone, she asked Ruth again where he was.

“He’s out on the property somewhere,” Ruth said vaguely, “but I can’t find him.”

Finally, Donna asked her why Rolf hadn’t responded to Ruth’s shouts to tell him he was wanted on the phone, and Ruth changed Rolf’s alleged location once again and said, “Oh, he’s over in Anacortes. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

By the time Donna hung up, she was highly suspicious. Why would her aunt give three different explanations about Rolf in one conversation?

Since Donna lived closest to her aunt and uncle, she was the one chosen to keep calling Ruth. Ruth told her the story about her upcoming divorce, and explained that Rolf had gone to Norway with Elinor Ekenes.

None of it had reassured Donna and Joy. When they talked to their mother, Mamie, she said that Ruth had told her an entirely different story. Annoyed that Donna was questioning her so closely about Rolf’s location, Ruth told Mamie that Rolf was in Maine and that she was going to drive back there to get him. “I’ll show him to Donna,”
Ruth sniffed, “if that’s what it will take to shut her up.”

In still another call to her oldest sister, Ruth used one of her other explanations about her husband’s whereabouts. “He’s in Greece—waiting for this to all blow over,” she said with just as much certainty as her other accountings for Rolf’s mysterious absence.

With further phone calls from Mamie, there were more excuses. “Rolf’s on a world cruise,” Ruth said, without explaining why he would have gone on such a trip alone. “He’s going to dock soon in Seattle. I’m going to bring him over to Donna’s and bring her a dozen roses, too, to apologize to her.”

By 1982, Ruth, in reality, was very angry with Donna Smith; she believed that Donna was the one who had told family secrets to the investigators. She phoned Donna on her birthday and said that she would be sending her “thirty dimes—thirty pieces of silver for payment for betraying me.”

Donna told the detectives that she was deathly afraid of Ruth, and what she might do in revenge. Hers was not an isolated instance of fear. Almost every friend and family member Clever and Keppel talked to eventually expressed an intense fear of Ruth.

In a way, it seemed ridiculous that anyone would be afraid of this plump, short woman with dimpled hands and a tightly curled old-fashioned perm.

But then, Rolf was still gone, and gone within a day or so of his first expression of trepidation about his wife’s dangerousness. Joy Stroup, Donna Smith, and Paul Myers were coming to the forefront of witnesses who would surely make an impact on some future jury. Ruth’s phone bills showed scores of calls back to Ohio and Illinois, and also to Donna, who lived in the Seattle area.

•  •  •

When Ruth finally ferreted out information that suggested Joy had given statements to the investigators, she stopped sending her money.

In October 1982, Ruth Neslund was briefly hospitalized. The Sheriff’s Office was told that she had suffered a stroke—which Ray Clever found was not true. Most people on Lopez Island believed she was at death’s door.

By 1983,
no one but the investigators from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, the prosecutor’s office, and the Attorney General’s Office believed that Ruth Neslund would ever go on trial for the murder of her missing husband—or for anything else. Rolf had been gone from Lopez Island for three years, and she was still living at her Alec Bay home. She had apparently bounced back from her stroke, and was enthusiastic about her newest enterprise. One of the local papers wrote a glowing review as Ruth’s long-awaited business venture debuted. It was remarkable in that there was not one mention of Ruth’s infamy in the Northwest.

“Lopez’s First Bed and Breakfast,” the headline read. The large photograph of Ruth accompanying the article showed a sweet-faced older woman placing silverware next to a gold-rimmed plate, with a baroque mirror, a polished sideboard, and shining silver candelabra behind her, and a glittering crystal chandelier above.

The Alec Bay Inn had just opened, and Ruth Neslund was offering guests four “attractive and comfortable bedrooms, with queen-sized beds, and wood-burning stove in each. Two rooms feature private baths.”

There was a music room, a library, sundecks, and a “magnificent view of Alec Bay.” The pool that Rolf had
once hoped to have completed in time for his siblings’ visit was now finished, still another attraction at Ruth’s new enterprise. Those guests who enjoyed the outdoors could look for driftwood on the Neslund home’s private beach, or explore “the lovely pastoral surroundings.”

Ruth knew what tourists sought; she had visited a number of similar establishments in picturesque settings around Washington. Every successful bed-and-breakfast had some kind of signature, or a “gimmick” to make it stand out. Ruth announced that she was featuring rare antique furniture in every room. She was considering adding an antiques store later on so that her guests could purchase items that would remind them of their visit to Lopez Island.

“I’ve always loved to cook,” she told the reporter, Betty Horne. “This project seems a natural for me, giving me an income and utilizing the things I like to do best.”

Rather than the token coffee, rolls, and fruit that many bed-and-breakfast homes served, Ruth offered a complete meal: “Eggs, hash browns, sausage, cereal, fruit or juice, homemade biscuits and bread, coffee or tea.”

In the first month after she opened her home to guests, Ruth Neslund seldom had vacancies. People came from all over the Northwest, California, and even England to enjoy the serenity and hospitality of the Alec Bay Inn.

Whether the notoriety of what was rumored to have happened in the huge home drew visitors, who could say? The house that was once home to Lizzie Borden has been a successful bed-and-breakfast. Some said that Ruth’s “gimmick” was not her antiques at all, but the possibility that a grotesque murder had occurred on the premises. Ruth Neslund was beginning to need a larger income. Her legal expenses were substantial.

By March 7, 1983,
the witnesses, physical evidence, and circumstantial evidence that made up the case against Nettie Ruth Neslund were all in place. At long last, she was charged with first-degree murder, with a trial date yet to come. At her arraignment, Ruth looked like someone’s grandmother in her navy blue patterned blouse, slacks, and a dark jacket, her heavily lined face solemn as Fred Weedon helped her up the courthouse steps at the county seat in Friday Harbor.

At her arraignment, Ruth quickly entered a plea of not guilty. Fred Weedon asked to have her bail lowered from $50,000 to $10,000—to no avail. Ruth posted a property bond to cover the $50,000.

Finally, the macabre secrets that the prosecution team and the investigators had been forced to hold close to their vests for so long were public knowledge. Not only the San Juan County papers, but both the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
and the
Seattle Times
featured front-page coverage, quoting the affidavit of probable cause.

What gossips had been whispering about for almost three years was apparently not that far from the truth as the prosecution saw it. Both Joy Stroup and Paul Myers had given statements alleging that they had conversations with
Ruth and Robert Myers about the events of August 8, 1980.

The Neslunds had had yet another violent argument that day. The impetus for their last quarrel would have been Rolf’s discovery that Ruth had taken control of all his financial assets and was preparing to mortgage the home he loved. Ruth had claimed to Paul and Joy that Rolf had hit her. Robert Myers, their summer visitor, had pulled Rolf off his sister.

At that point, the state maintained, Ruth had grabbed one of her many guns and shot Rolf twice in the head as Myers held him.

The brother and sister were then alleged to have set about to get rid of his body and to hide all evidence of the crime. How they reportedly did that was allegedly far more gruesome than even the darkest speculations that had circled San Juan County for three years.

Despite island gossip, however, no meat-grinder had been involved.

Even so, to many, Rolf Neslund’s disappearance and the way the case was playing out was too bizarre to be true. And there were more T-shirts and more dark humor. John Saul, the bestselling Lopez Island thriller author, penned an epic limerick about the Neslund mystery. Read aloud at one of Saul’s frequent gatherings for Northwest writers, it was hilarious because the case had become almost mythic.

Saul has a keen wit, and he is especially good at satire. His humor is the antithesis of his suspense-filled books, which are undisputedly chilling and not to be read at night when the reader is alone. New stanzas to the Neslund mystery
continue to emerge from Saul’s facile pen every few months:

One night at the Alec Bay Innie

A drunk shot Rolf Neslund, the ninnie

While dear Brother Bub