No Regrets (19 page)

Finally, she sat down in the witness chair. Eugenie spoke English perfectly but, of course, with a distinct
Scandinavian accent. She talked of happier times, her voice modulated but close to breaking. Rather than dissolve into tears, Eugenie occasionally fell silent until she regained her composure. She stressed that Rolf had not come to see them in Norway during the summer of 1980 or any time after. And Ruth had stopped calling her, despite her promise to stay in touch so they could find Rolf.

“He was not only my brother, he was one of my best friends,” Eugenie said bleakly.

The state had hoped
to finish its case before Thanksgiving, and the defense expected to begin after the long holiday weekend. They didn’t make that time limit, but they weren’t far off the mark. Now the big question was: Will Ruth take the witness stand? She had indicated even before her trial that she was anxious to tell her story, and she was confident that the jurors and everyone else would see that she had been falsely accused.

But it’s a rule of thumb among defense lawyers in cases involving criminal violence that the appearance of the defendant on the witness stand is almost always bad news. Some may come across as too confident or cocky, others may irritate jurors, and some may give away too much information. Once a murder defendant testifies, he (or she) opens himself up to cross-examination by the prosecution and to questions that defense attorneys’ wiser judgment never want to be asked.

No matter what Fred Weedon or Ellsworth Connelly advised, those who knew Ruth Neslund felt she would do as she pleased. She trusted Weedon and she had leaned on him for years, but she was a stubborn woman who, in the end, made her own decisions.

Fred Weedon answered all the questions that had been posed earlier on Monday, December 2, as he made his
opening statements. He laid out his case for the jurors, and he exuded confidence as he did so. If he had tried to dissuade Ruth from testifying, he gave no indication. Instead, he said she would testify, and she “would welcome the opportunity to speak after years and years of island gossip.”

Not only would the defendant give the jury the true story of her last night with her husband, Weedon promised to present witnesses who had seen Rolf Neslund after he was alleged to have vanished.

There would be testimony from people who had observed that Rolf was so depressed after the bridge accident two years earlier that he had spoken of suicide. “He was an eighty-year-old man who was getting forgetful, an eighty-year-old man who was increasingly concerned about his own mortality,” Weedon reminded the jurors.

Hadn’t Elinor Ekenes testified that she had dinner with Rolf on August 5, 1980, and that she had advised him to “run away to Norway”? Weedon portrayed Rolf as “a man torn between two loves,” a situation that must have only contributed to his depression.

“I do not stand here to try to put a halo over Ruth’s head,” Weedon said easily. “It’s not going to fit.” Ruth was an admitted heavy drinker and her marriage to Rolf had become storm-tossed and angry. Yes, they had an argument on August 8. And, yes, Ruth had called her niece in Ohio. But Weedon insisted that Ruth and Rolf had made up after that call, and then they had sat down to dinner together.

And, yes, Ruth had transferred close to one hundred thousand dollars from their joint accounts into accounts in her name only. But that was only wise business sense. “She wanted to avoid possible losses that might come from the bridge accident.”

A successful lawsuit could have wiped the Neslunds out financially.

The blood found in the house was just as easy to explain, Fred Weedon pointed out. During their fights, the Neslunds had drawn blood. Moreover, there had been accidents during the time that Ruth and those she hired built the house in 1976-78.

As for the .38-caliber revolver that the state dubbed the murder weapon, Weedon promised to present witnesses who would stipulate that that gun wasn’t even purchased until December 1980—four months after the alleged murder date.

Weedon’s opening remarks were compelling. He was describing the case from the other side of the looking glass, and it was riveting to hear his “What if?” arguments that demanded jurors and court-watchers consider that Ruth Neslund might be a totally innocent woman who had been widowed through no fault of her own.

From where Fred Weedon sat, Ruth wasn’t perfect, but she had done what she could—allegedly at Rolf’s instigation to protect their retirement money. And Rolf—far from being the content retired man—was, instead, a suicidal, depressed, fading image of the robust man of his youth.

And then, Weedon suggested, Rolf would have suffered a crushing blow to learn that Elinor would not be waiting for him in Norway, but on her honeymoon with another man. Would that not have been enough to make an old man take his own life?

Perhaps. But the defense position on the blood evidence was hard to believe. It was difficult to envision that much blood flung, spattered, dripped, sprayed, and even vaporized from “building accidents” and domestic fights. Rod Englert had specified that the amount of blood that
had soaked into the concrete slabs was so profuse that it remained there despite being treated with chemicals and scraped with a grinder. The Portland detective said there was “a large quantity of blood, consistent with very major artery bleeding.” As the Neslunds fought, they had drawn blood by scratching each other, and left bruises, but “arterial bleeding”? No.

Nevertheless, Weedon and Connelly began the defense by questioning witnesses who said Rolf Neslund had been a different man after the bridge accident, a man likely to commit suicide. After the Coast Guard had found him negligent in his duty as a pilot, he had changed.

Acquaintances, men from Lopez Island, and those who had known him elsewhere or worked with him followed one another to the witness stand. They spoke of his supposed despair because he had been forced to retire from the career he loved.

“He’d been in it all his life,” one man said. “[After the accident], the best way I can describe it is a whipped dog, a deflated ego.”

Another said, “I think he was a lot different person after the accident. You could tell he was depressed and upset about it.”

A fellow pilot, Captain Roy Quinn, testified that he had visited Rolf in February 1980, and Rolf told him that he was being named in a lawsuit seeking damages for the West Seattle Bridge. When Quinn warned him to be careful, and find somewhere to put his pension fund where it couldn’t be touched, Quinn said Rolf had answered, “Mama and I have taken care of that. In my own name, I don’t have a dime anymore.”

Quinn felt that Rolf had been “disturbed” after the
Chavez
hit the West Seattle Bridge. “When we were talking
one on one, he was depressed. When there were other people around, he put up a front.” He added that Rolf had been forgetful and would sometimes “blank out.”

“My father-in-law had similar spells, when he was in his eighties. And then he committed suicide. I told Rolf about that. He said to me, ‘I think I’d do the same thing.’”

One defense witness bolstered Ruth’s claim that Rolf had left her of his own accord. “He told me he was going to Norway in early August,” the man testified. “He said, ‘I’ll be back before the holidays, and if I decide to stay longer, I will.’”

On cross-examination, this witness argued continually with Greg Canova. Ignoring courtroom protocol and Judge Bibb’s repeated warnings, the witness offered his opinion without being asked a question. “I don’t want to get intimidated by lies,” he shouted at Canova. “You’re getting the cart before the horse!”

When he complained to Fred Weedon about Canova, saying, “This sucker’s trying to nail me and he ain’t going to nail me,” Judge Bibb told Weedon if he could not control his witness, he would find him in contempt of court.

After a sudden recess, the witness stopped offering comments, but he refused to budge on his stance that, as far as he was concerned, Rolf Neslund had gone to Norway.

A man named John Norman who had done odd jobs for the Neslunds swore on his oath that he had seen Rolf two days after the day he was supposed to have been shot to death. Norman was convinced he had seen Rolf riding the ferry to Anacortes on August 10. He was sure of the date because he and a friend were going to McDonald’s to celebrate the friend’s birthday.

At this point in his testimony, the witness began to cry,
explaining that his friend had died since then. But he knew that date, and he saw Rolf Neslund sitting in the backseat of a car between a Lopez Island couple.

“He said, ‘Hi Boss.’ That’s his nickname for me. He was kinda pale and he looked tired.”

“You’re certain that it was Mr. Neslund?” Weedon asked.

“Absolutely.”

But Norman wasn’t so sure on cross-examination by Greg Canova, who asked him if he and his friend often went to Anacortes to eat at McDonald’s. He allowed that that was true.

“Isn’t it true that you testified at a special inquiry hearing that the last time you saw Rolf Neslund was in 1979?”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Norman said somewhat vaguely. He was not an ideal witness.

Weedon called a workman who had helped Ruth build her house a few years before Rolf vanished. He recalled that he had smashed his thumb and cut his hand and dripped blood both times. Interestingly, he recalled the location of his bloodletting was in Ruth’s bathroom, and along the hallway where the search warrant team had isolated blood the state said was Rolf’s.

In a surprise move, the defense called Elinor Ekenes! She seemed an unlikely witness for Ruth’s side, but she had to respond to a subpoena to appear. At first, she recalled, Rolf had made jokes about the ship accident and he hadn’t considered it a tragedy at all. It was his relationship with Ruth that made him “very unhappy.”

Elinor acknowledged that Rolf had spoken about his will when she talked to him on July 27, 1980. He wanted
to change it. “He said, ‘I want you and the boys to get whatever I have left.’”

She also said that Rolf had been afraid of how he might die, and that he asked her to see that he had an autopsy to determine the cause if he passed away.

It was doubtful that Elinor helped the defense.

If possible,
the courtroom was even more jammed with spectators than it had been earlier. On December 6, 1985, Ruth Neslund herself emerged from the elevator to encounter a gaggle of television cameras and reporters. Her son, Butch Daniels, was there from Louisiana to help her, and her attorneys flanked her protectively. She turned away from the microphones held out in the hope that she would give some memorable quote, and made her way slowly to the courtroom, leaning heavily on her four-footed steel cane. Her hair, a mixture of stark white and iron gray was straight and cut in a short, mannish style now, parted on the side. Her clothing was quite suitable for a heavy-set woman of sixty-five. She still wore the dark blue polyester slack suit that had become familiar to the gallery. She had changed only her blouses—from ruffled white to prints. Sometimes, she added a scarf, and she did on this day.

Facing the possibility of life in prison if she failed to convince her jurors of her innocence, Ruth seemed confident. At times, she was very serious and, when it seemed appropriate, she used a little humor.

She had told reporters a few days earlier that she “could hardly wait” to take the stand, and laughingly teased them by saying they should have followed her to the bathroom
with their cameras. She seemed almost to enjoy being the center of attention.

Now, as she faced the gallery and its rows of acquaintances and strangers who seemed to lean forward in anticipation about what she had to say, Ruth Neslund stared back, her face arranged in an unfathomable mask.

She would seldom waver in her answers to Fred Wee-don’s questions, although, when she did, it was usually about specific dates. Not facts.

Once more, Ruth described the night when her husband had left her to go to Norway. She believed that he had arranged to join Elinor, the mother of his two sons. “He told me that she was going, and he was going, and I assumed they would go together or get together once they got there,” she testified. It was something that she had to accept, something she had feared for many years. She spoke now of the way their marriage had disintegrated after Rolf retired.

“He was allowed to retire gracefully and could keep his papers without surrendering his license. After he retired, our relations changed considerably. Communications fell off substantially,” Ruth said. “He would not stay in the same room [with me], and he would go off by himself.”

She recalled that she was frequently left alone in the few months prior to Rolf’s deserting her. “He would take trips to the mainland and be gone for days sometimes.”

Asked about his state of mind, Ruth didn’t use the word depressed. But she had seen a change in him after the bridge incident. “He did a lot of daydreaming. He lost a lot of his whistle and sing,” she said. “His big concern was being sued over the bridge accident. He was afraid we would lose everything we had to the City of Seattle.”

What they had enjoyed together during their twenty
years of marriage was gone, and she had accepted that. And with Rolf’s disintegration, their financial picture changed, too. She had always been in charge of their money, even before they were married. She estimated that about $120,000 had been “piddled away” during the first year of Rolf’s retirement. “Sometimes he threatened to take the money and put it in kroner.”

Ruth said she had tried to loan money for the interest and to make investments to keep them from bankruptcy. “He was very careless with money—he’d cram wads of it in his pockets—but he’d never take money directly from me. If I gave him a twenty, for instance, he wouldn’t take it from my hand. I would have to cash checks and put money in his dresser drawer.

“He never wanted to be involved. He wouldn’t even know how to balance a checkbook.”

Fred Weedon asked Ruth how Rolf got the money for his flight to Norway, and she answered easily. “He said he had plenty of money already in Norway. When I asked him how he got it there, he said it was none of my business.”