No Regrets (22 page)

They all found Paul Myers a weak witness, but didn’t rule out his testimony.

These twelve ordinary citizens were going through the time-worn process that had turned them into cohesive, thoughtful decision makers. But it was not without angst and tears and frustration.

•  •  •

Finally, near 5:00
P.M
. on Sunday, December 15, the jurors signaled that they had a verdict. Word spread like wildfire around the islands. The principals hurried to the courthouse by ferry, car, and chartered plane. Judge Bibb had been attending a Christmas party, and he was flown in in a small plane. The dignified, white-haired judge still wore his large, bright red, holiday bow tie.

Superior Court Clerk Mary Jean Cahail got the call that the jury had a verdict from Fred Weedon. She said she and her husband would be glad to give Ruth Neslund a ride to the courthouse. Ruth had been staying at a Friday Harbor bed-and-breakfast while she and everyone else waited for the jury to return.

“We picked her up,” Mary Jean recalls, “and it was as if we were just going for a Sunday evening outing. She was very casual, and didn’t seem worried at all.”

The jurors themselves, who were fully aware of the waiting news helicopter and the covey of reporters on the courthouse roof, had developed strategies to avoid being ambushed by the media as they walked to the courtroom. On this night, as always, they sent their oldest member ahead. At seventy-seven, it took her longer to make the walk and she limped along with her cane. But she was wily and knew she was also sent out as a scout. She saw the reporters who were ready to pounce, ducked behind a sign, and gave a hand signal to tell the rest of the jury to take an alternate route.

The courtroom was full to bursting by 7:00
P.M
.

Ruth Neslund sat stolidly as the jury filed in. They did not look at her, and several of them had puffy eyes. One female juror had tear-stained cheeks. That didn’t bode well for Ruth.

If Ruth didn’t feel a chill, she should have. In the last
few moments before the verdict was read, the courtroom was hushed. There were no cameras, other than television cameras focused on Judge Bibb to catch the moment he read the verdict. The court had forbidden photos of Ruth Neslund or the attorneys, and he had warned against demonstrations or emotion.

Finally, the slip of paper holding the verdict was handed to Judge Bibb. He scanned it without expression and then he read it in a solemn voice: “We, the jury, find the defendant . . . guilty . . . of first-degree murder.”

His words were a lightning bolt, unexpected and shocking.

Al Cummings, a very well-known Seattle-area personality who was both a disk jockey and a freelance writer, sat up and bolted from his seat—only to be chastised by Judge Bibb and told to sit down.

All the reporters present, including Keith Eldridge, from Channel Four in Seattle, were champing at the bit to get to phones, but they obeyed Bibb’s instructions.

No one in the courtroom had expected this verdict. Ruth had also been found guilty of being “armed with a deadly weapon,” an automatic five-year consecutive sentence that would be added to whatever her punishment for murder would be.

Fred Weedon turned to Ruth and hugged her several times, trying to comfort her. She rubbed her eyes several times, as if in disbelief.

As the jurors were individually asked if they agreed with the first-degree murder verdict, each of them phrased their answer exactly as Juror Number One, Lisa Boyd, had. “Yes, Your Honor.” One woman broke into loud sobs and the others had tears in their eyes.

The feeling in the courtroom was mostly one of shock.
Virtually no one had expected that Rolf Neslund’s murder would be deemed premeditated, planned in any kind of organized fashion. Even the judge admitted to being surprised. Almost everyone in the courtroom wore a stunned expression. Some had expected acquittal, and others thought that Ruth might only be convicted of manslaughter. But first-degree murder? It looked as though no one was prepared for that. There were no cheers and no smiles, not even among the prosecution team.

Ruth Neslund herself did not change expression.

She leaned heavily on her four-footed cane as she made her way slowly out of the courtroom toward the elevator, her skin the color of putty, her eyes beginning to redden. She was escorted now by Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy and Detective Ray Clever. Fred Weedon accompanied her, appearing far more distraught than she was.

Ruth was under arrest and headed for jail. She waved off reporters who tried to either get a quote from her or help her up the steps to a waiting squad car. “I’ll make it. I’ll make it—it’s all right.”

It was not clear if she was talking about the steps or the prison sentence that lay ahead.

Fred Weedon came back to the courtroom and broke down. He had genuine tears in his eyes. In his eighteen years as an attorney, he had never had a client convicted of first-degree murder. Not until now.

As spectators, courthouse employees, and some jurors wept, Foreman Elizabeth Roberts spoke to reporters, representing the twelve. “It was a very difficult decision,” she said. “We worked hard. It was not the decision we wanted to come up with. We wish we could have found a different decision. The evidence was too much. It was just one thing on top of another, on top of another. It was very difficult
for all of us. I don’t know what else to say. It was just a whole lot of details that added up...”

Juror Jeanne Barnes said that all of the jurors had started deliberations with a “gut feeling” that Ruth Neslund was guilty, but the evidence wasn’t strong enough to convince all twelve that she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. However, on Sunday, they had discovered what they called their “smoking gun.” It was an ad Ruth had placed in the paper on August 13, 1980—one day before August 14, the date Ruth testified that Rolf left.

Ruth had advertised their house for sale. “If she was expecting him to come back, what was he coming back to?”

By Sunday afternoon, the jurors had gone from five to seven in favor of conviction, and then they had come down to one juror who was holding out for acquittal. They had dealt with the question of the unscarred tub and the element of premeditation. It was the fact that Ruth had apparently shot not once, but twice, that led them to decide Rolf’s murder was premeditated, if only during a few seconds. Ruth had told so many people so many times how easily she could shoot Rolf. And the jury found that she had, indeed, planned ahead of time to kill her husband. If she had shot only once, they felt, premeditation had not been proven. But according to Paul, she had ordered their brother Robert to hold Rolf while she went to her bedroom to retrieve her .38, and then she had shot him twice.

But it had taken the newspaper ad to convince the final juror not to vote for acquittal.

Judge Bibb set January 13, 1986, as Ruth Neslund’s sentencing date. He would later say that if it had been up to him alone, he would have come back with a second-degree murder conviction. But Fred Weedon and Ruth Neslund had chosen a trial by jury.

•  •  •

Although they had been locked together while they deliberated, most of the jurors weren’t ready to go home yet. Some of them had missed the last ferries home and had to stay overnight in the same two-story motel where they had been sequestered. But others stayed because they needed to talk. Even those who lived in Friday Harbor were reluctant to leave.

They gathered in one room to watch the television news flashes about their verdict, and then longer coverage. They had bonded during the long trial, and they still needed to talk about different aspects of the case that had troubled them.

They talked far into the wee hours of the morning. At length, this experience was over for them, although they would never forget it.

The day after
the verdict came in, even though the long trial was over and Christmas was little more than a week away, there were still surprises. One of the male jurors contacted Fred Weedon and arranged to meet him at a Friday Harbor tavern on December 16, the day after the verdict’s announcement. Bruce Cohen said now that he had misunderstood the evidence on one of the want ads Ruth had placed in mid-August 1980.

Cohen told Weedon that he had seen the newspaper ad that showed Ruth was selling a three-bedroom house within a week of her husband’s disappearance. He believed it was her own home that she was selling, and now realized that it was not, but only a friend’s. Ruth had only inserted her own phone number in the ad.

“If I’d known that,” Cohen told Weedon, “it would have been a hung jury.”

But the state had never said that Ruth was selling her own home, nor had Weedon offered evidence that she was not. Judicial precedent would not call for a new trial or a mistrial because of the manner in which a juror’s mind reached an opinion. Not unless there was jury misconduct. Legal experts pointed out that there must be some finality in trials. If jurors’ mental processes were to be examined endlessly, trials could go on forever. Whatever jurors think
or view inside the jury room is permitted, but jurors cannot do investigations on their own—such as visiting crime scenes by themselves, talking to witnesses, or looking at exhibits that have not been admitted. That would be outside the pale.

Ruth had quickly put a number of items up for sale after Rolf left, but not her house. Not until she advertised it in the
Wall Street Journal
in May 1981, after Ray Clever and Greg Doss had begun to question her.

Juror Cohen’s second thoughts did not lead to a new trial.

On January 13, 1986, after spending the holidays in jail, Ruth Neslund was sentenced to life in prison. While prosecutors argued for a thirty-year minimum, Judge Bibb said he would recommend a minimum of only twenty years. Even with time off for good behavior, Ruth would have to serve thirteen years and seven months. At sixty-five and in poor health, it was not likely she would leave prison alive.

But, for now, Ruth was still fighting. “I didn’t kill my husband. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t,” she said once more. She recalled that she and Rolf had their “ups and downs,” and that the latter had become more frequent. She admitted that she had been feeling sorry for herself, and that her last few years had been “what the young people call a real drag.”

Pleading with Judge Bibb to find some way for her to go home, Ruth said, “I wouldn’t hurt Rolf, let alone kill him. Whether it’s twenty or thirty years, it’s not going to matter because I’m not going to last very long. You and I both know it.”

Ruth went home on January 25. With the loyal support of eight San Juan County friends, who mortgaged their homes to raise the $150,000 security bond needed before
she could be released, she returned to the home she and Rolf had once called “Shangri-La.” While Fred Weedon appealed her sentence, she planned to return to running her bed-and-breakfast business.

Ruth Neslund had numerous islanders who believed in her innocence, many of whom were well-respected citizens. One was Charlotte Paul Reese, the author. Reese was a former member of the Washington State Board of Prisons and Paroles, and a presidential appointee to the U.S. Board of Paroles. She wrote to Judge Bibb to ask that Ruth be granted a retrial, or at the very least that she be released on her own personal recognizance.

Ruth could hold her head up high, reassured in the knowledge that influential people believed in her. She had always had a good grip on the English language, one that belied her lack of formal education, and she spoke to
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reporter Larry Lange in an interview in which she castigated those who she felt had unfairly seen her convicted of murder.

She was very angry at Winnie Kay Stafford—who was despondent after she testified. She scoffed at the idea that Winnie Kay was competent enough to speak out against her in court. “If I have any feeling for her,” Ruth said, “it’s that she’s loused up her life pretty bad.”

As for her brother Paul, Ruth said that he had made up his testimony based solely on “gossip” he’d heard in local bars. She said he did that in an effort to claim reward money from the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association for information about Rolf. She believed Paul had been paid by prosecutors and that he needed cash to support his craving for alcohol: “He has a thirty-dollar-a-day habit and a seven-dollar-a-day pension.”

She gave Greg Canova short shrift, dubbing him “a
cannibalistic prosecutor who bases every question on a [false] premise. He can kill me but he can’t eat me.”

Whatever that meant.

Ruth Neslund had little respect for the jurors who found her guilty of murder, claiming that several members “had never made a decision in their lives other than buying a used washing machine.”

She was convinced that at least one juror had relied on something heard outside the trial, and felt that she had been victimized by the fact that some jurors lived on islands in San Juan County other than Lopez. “Those people look down on Lopez,” she snorted, “as the ‘hick island’ in the group.” She added that “competition between islands is terrific!”

How such competition might have made a difference in evidence in a murder trial was somewhat obscure. But Ruth Neslund hurried on, saying that she chose to treat her life as if everything was normal. She would continue to run the Alec Bay Inn, and wait for the hundreds of daffodil bulbs she had planted in her garden to bloom. She even invited the reporter to bring his wife and stay in her bed-and-breakfast.

She smiled benevolently as she said, “I really don’t go around killing people!”

Despite the guilty verdict, life went on virtually unchanged for Ruth Neslund. Business was brisk at the inn, and she was a gracious hostess to all who stayed there. Her civil suit against the Sheriff’s Department and the prosecutors—where she once sought $750,000 for alleged damage to her home during the 1983 search—was resolved
quietly. She and her attorneys settled, in January 1986, for $6,000.

“We would have cleaned and repaired her house right after the search,” Ray Clever said, “but she ordered us off the property.”