No Regrets (20 page)

Ruth Neslund and her attorney were characterizing her as a loyal, commonsense woman who had been at her wits’ end trying to save what she and her husband had worked many years to build. It was an effective stance. And now Weedon opened up the matter of excessive alcohol consumption in the Neslunds’ house of cards. There was no avoiding it, and it was wise of him to encourage her to talk about it, in hopes of defusing the state’s description of her probable alcoholism. Her own lawyer asked her to describe the exacerbation of her dependence upon drinking.

She nodded sadly. Drinking had been a constant thing
in their home. “We called it the house that beer built,” she said, “because we supplied a case of beer daily for those working on the house.” (That in itself might explain why Ruth’s workmen had so many accidents on the job . . .)

“We did do heavy drinking and drank too much every day. It sharpened the resentments Rolf had. He felt pretty much cooped up after his retirement and that would come out. He would make us drinks and then say, ‘Drown yourself.’ That would antagonize me and I’d say, ‘You drown yourself.’ This would lead into stinking little arguments which would grow into physical fights—up to three or four a month. We’d get up the next morning and sometimes not even remember the fights, except we saw our broken glasses, our bruises, a broken tooth, a broken lamp. We’d get along great in the morning. It was like the fights never happened...”

Ruth’s testimony was not unlike the self-revealing admissions often heard at AA meetings. With Weedon’s careful questioning, she was baring her soul. She said she hadn’t thought of herself as an alcoholic in the summer of 1980, but in retrospect, she thought she must have been. She had been blind to so many things that happened. She, Rolf, and most of their friends drank continually.

Still, she recalled setting a limit for herself of three drinks a day. If she poured herself a fourth, she called it “a boomer,” and said that she never drank that one.

Ruth wasn’t surprised that a lot of bloodstains were located in her house. She had long suffered from high blood pressure, and often had nosebleeds (a common side effect). Sometimes, she had saturated up to four hand towels before she could manage to stop the bleeding.

Ruth had an even more elaborate explanation for how Type A Positive blood was found in the shower door frame
of her bathroom. In yet another “household accident,” Rolf had cut his fingers on a table saw. He was bleeding profusely, and Ruth said she had tried to take him to a medical clinic. He refused to go until he had taken a shower. “I told him to hold his hand in the air to keep it from bleeding [in the shower].”

There was the matter of Ruth’s strange comments at the Puget Sound Pilots’ party in January 1981. Why had Ruth said, “Rolf is in heaven”?

“Oh,” she said with a faint smile, repeating a story she had told the sheriff. “I meant that to mean he was in Norway, because to my husband to be in Norway is to be in heaven! Never, by the wildest stretch of my imagination could I imagine Rolf being in God’s heaven. Never...”

Whether she thought him too wicked to be in heaven or she was trying to say he wasn’t dead after all wasn’t clear.

It had been six weeks since the first day of trial when Greg Canova rose to cross-examine Ruth Neslund. Canova was a handsome man in his thirties with black hair and a luxuriant mustache, charismatic in the courtroom. But Ruth viewed him suspiciously.

She was dismissive and incredulous as the special prosecutor asked her about her alleged phone calls to her niece, Joy Stroup. Ruth said she had no recollection of those. When Canova asked her, “You don’t recall telling your niece that you wanted to waste Rolf?” Ruth replied, “I’ve never used that word. I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“You didn’t tell her that you just shot Rolf and he was burning in the burn barrel?”

“I don’t remember that specific call. Why would I say
that? No, I didn’t. There was no reason to...You can shout that from the housetops, but it is not true.” And then she added, “I have relatives who would say anything you’d want to hear for forty dollars.”

Ruth said she wasn’t necessarily referring to Joy, but that some of her relatives could be bought. She said she might have made some phone calls on August 8. “I was upset and hurting because I knew Rolf was leaving. I got into my cups during those days, too. I think I drank quite a lot when I knew he was going.”

As for Donna Smith, Joy’s sister, Ruth was angry at her betrayal, but she didn’t remember any phone conversations or particular incidents.

“Didn’t you, in fact, call her and tell her you were going to be sending her thirty pieces of silver, a reference to the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas for betraying Jesus?” Canova pressed.

“No. I wouldn’t have said that because I don’t consider her a real Christian,” Ruth sniffed.

Ruth herself wasn’t known for churchgoing; still, she took on a pious look.

Even though Greg Canova pointed out that Ruth had given different testimony in many areas in earlier hearings, she remained unruffled—and gave new explanations.

Now, after hearing Paul Myers testify against her about what he had heard her say regarding Rolf’s murder and the disposal of his body, Ruth deemed her brother “a pathological liar,” and a thief, a heavy drinker, whom she had rescued from his filthy living quarters and tried to rehabilitate on Lopez Island.

But hadn’t she praised Paul earlier in earlier hearings?
Canova asked. “You said you were closer to Paul than to your other brothers and sisters?”

“I must say that I had mixed up pity for love,” she answered quickly.

If she had given different testimony at the special inquiry hearing in 1981, in the areas Canova specified—and, indeed, she had—she explained that was because she had been “confused” at the time.

Ruth Neslund was implacable on the witness stand. She had an explanation for everything, even though her reasoning and answers didn’t mesh with what she had said in the years just past, or with the physical evidence. She admitted only to being a too-trusting wife who was about to be abandoned, and to drinking too much in an effort to block out her emotional pain.

As for murder? No one had ever found even a smidgen of Rolf’s body. He was alive when he left her, and for all she knew, he might still be alive someplace.

And when Fred Weedon asked her the inevitable and burning question on redirect: “Did you shoot Rolf Neslund?” Ruth spoke clearly and emphatically.

“I did not shoot Rolf.”

Ruth’s son, Warren “Butch” Daniels, testified that his mother hadn’t even purchased the Smith & Wesson .38 that the prosecution said tested positive for blood until after the alleged murder. He insisted that it had been bought in December 1980—four months after Rolf Neslund disappeared. She had bought it from a gun shop in Slidell, Louisiana.

On cross-examination, Canova suggested that it was not the Smith & Wesson she obtained that December and whose receipt was submitted as evidence by the defense,
but the Colt Python that was also found in her dresser drawer.

“Mr. Daniels, isn’t it correct that when your mother was there in 1980, the gun you gave her to take back to Seattle for her protection was, in fact, a Colt Python .357 Magnum, and this [Smith & Wesson] gun, this .38 caliber, was one you had given her on one of her earlier visits back in ’79?”

“No.”

Although Butch Daniels would not budge in his testimony, Judge Bibb later ruled that the gun receipt would be excluded from consideration by the jury.

The final witness for the defense was called on Wednesday, December 11. Fred Weedon called the defense’s own criminalist, a “freelance” forensic scientist, Raymond Davis. Davis said he disagreed with the Washington State Patrol’s crime lab experts, and with Rod Englert. In his opinion, the splatters of blood drops on the ceilings of the Alec Bay home had not come from a gunshot. He told the jurors that the blood mist was “also consistent with medium-velocity cast-off blood,” saying it could have come from an instrument or weapon that administered a blow. (Blood-spatter experts agree that it is very unlikely to mix up such diverse blood patterns.)

Davis said he had inspected the bathtub in Ruth’s bedroom, but had not noted any chipping, gouges, dents, or defects at all. He testified that he would expect a broad-axe to have left such marks.

As a professed expert in the burning of bodies, Davis insisted it was not possible to reduce human body parts to ashes in an open burn barrel. “Large and long bones, perhaps flesh, would remain.”

He was not correct with that information. After two
hours of intense heat, almost any human body will be reduced to only ashes.

It was the predictable “war of the experts.” Who knew how the jurors would weigh what Davis had deduced against Englert’s more professional presentation?

Ruth had her two close women friends on Lopez Island: fish-buyer Wanda Post and Ruth’s neighbor, Winnie Kay Stafford. Wanda had testified that Ruth had never spoken to her about her husband’s desertion or said anything about killing Rolf or disposing of his body.

“Isn’t it correct,” Greg Canova asked, “that she didn’t have to tell you why Rolf left because she told you she’d killed him?”

“No, that is not correct.”

“Remember,” he warned, “you are under oath.”

“I know that.”

Wanda Post would not be shaken from her conviction, even though Paul Myers had testified that he had heard Ruth bragging to both Wanda and Winnie Kay over cocktails about how she had literally destroyed her husband.

The other witness who could be extremely helpful to the prosecution was missing. Winnie Kay Stafford was deathly afraid of testifying. Winnie Kay had once been utterly devoted to Ruth Neslund, and Paul said she, too, had been privy to many clouded secrets, but she didn’t want to talk about them.

Winnie Kay had told other island residents that she was afraid of Ruth, so fearful that she had moved. Packing up her life and leaving the Alec Bay Road neighborhood wasn’t very effective, however. Winnie Kay had first moved from the south end of Lopez Island to get away
from Ruth, but her relocation was laughable; she only went as far as the middle of the tiny island, merely a hop, skip, and jump away from the Alec Bay Inn. Further, at any given time, Winnie Kay’s location was easy to determine. She was a well-known island personage who showed up at almost all public functions on Lopez, and attended every party. She had once been a stunning woman, and now—in her midforties—she was still very attractive, slender, with long brown hair that she wore either up in a bouffant style or cascading down her back. Author John Saul’s parents had known Winnie Kay for years, and the thriller writer often encountered her at parties. But now, suddenly no one saw her.

There was a rumor that someone in Ruth’s camp had warned Winnie Kay that she would be better off far away from Friday Harbor, and that testifying against Ruth would be “unfortunate” for her.

For whatever reason, Winnie Kay Stafford had driven south with a woman friend, headed for California. She had detoured into Arizona to drop her friend off, and now was reportedly “hiding out” in San Diego, California, with family members. Winnie had been full of anxiety about testifying. She was caught between her fear of Ruth and her concern that she might be prosecuted for being an accessory after the fact in Rolf’s demise, or, at the very least, for perjury.

Winnie Kay had lied to a judge before to save Ruth, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near Ruth’s murder trial. She was afraid she might go to jail.

Despite the intense interest
in Ruth Neslund’s trial, life went on as it always had on the San Juan Islands. Residents crowded the ferries to do holiday shopping in Anacortes, Bellingham, and Seattle. Christmas lights appeared on the village streets and in the windows of homes, incongruous colored beacons, holiday counterpoints to the grisly testimony about blood, burning bodies, betrayal, and infidelity. As serious as the trial was, there was an almost “soap opera” feeling to it, as if it was still difficult to view as something that had actually happened to fellow island dwellers. Both Fred Weedon and Greg Canova were dynamic and attractive men—just like the lawyers on
All My Children
and
The Young and the Restless.
And while no one could describe Ruth Neslund as a glamorous woman, she did have a gift for the dramatic, an actress playing a powerful older woman who steadfastly denied any culpability in an alleged murder, seeming to be almost someone following a script.

But as each new spate of long-hidden information morphed from rumor to admission, whispers became shouts. What was happening was not only real—it was moving faster than any television soap. Celebrities like Robert Goulet had been mentioned and scores of people the locals knew—their own neighbors—were achieving a
kind of overnight fame themselves as they testified. The nightly news on the ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates in Washington State featured the Neslund trial at the top of the news. This was arguably the biggest media event ever to happen in San Juan County.

Christmas Eve was two weeks away. The trial was winding up when, right on cue, local papers headlined “Surprise Witness!” In real life, most trials hardly ever have such startling turns. It is the stuff of
Perry Mason
and
Matlock.

Some expected that it would be Robert Myers, Ruth’s alleged accomplice, who was coming to testify. But Robert was in a nursing home, long since lost to a mind full of clouds. He had been adjudged senile and unfit to be a credible witness.

No—it was the elusive Winnie Kay Stafford who had been located, Winnie Kay who was still petrified about testifying to the dynamite information she had kept secret. In the end, prosecutors had little choice but to offer her a plea bargain that would grant her immunity from perjury charges regarding her testimony at the special inquiry hearing shortly after Rolf Neslund vanished. She accepted the offer, and now she was coming home to take the stand as a rebuttal witness for the state.

Winnie Kay was, perhaps, the most nervous witness of all the frankly anxiety-ridden witnesses who had been heard from so far, and she had reason to be. She tried to avoid looking at her one-time best friend, averting her eyes from Ruth’s stare. In answer to Greg Canova’s questions, Winnie Kay admitted that she had gone to the Neslund home late on the night of August 8, 1980. Ruth had called and told her to come.