No Regrets (24 page)

Ireland had been photographed with celebrities, including Mae West and Daryl Zanuck, and had once appeared on an early Steve Allen show. When the psychic told Gordon Keith that he could not visualize Rolf Neslund as dead, and, indeed, felt he was hiding near palm trees—not in Tucson or San Diego, but in Phoenix, Arizona—another bizarre chapter of the Neslund saga opened.

Although Richard Ireland claimed to know nothing of the case, he told Keith in 1988:

But, of course, the “trail” had been followed and followed and followed by a lot of brilliant young detectives.

Galvanized, Gordon Keith sent manuscript queries to several Northwest newspapers and television stations.

He was enraged and incredulous when he got either slight interest or no response at all. Keith then started his own newspaper, in which he could print his theories about Ruth’s innocence. He apparently had no copy editor and his articles were rife with misspelled words, and although he decried the way justice had been done—or not done— he gave no specifics to prove Ruth innocent. Keith was aghast that no one believed Ruth’s answers to his questions in his “exclusive interview” with her, but they were just versions of what she had said so often. And only he believed in Dr. Richard Ireland’s visions.

Gordon Keith died before he ever completed a manuscript about the Neslund case and Ruth’s innocence. Dr. Richard Ireland is also dead, and cannot be reached to explain his condemnation of the state’s case against Ruth and his visions of Rolf Neslund alive and well among palm trees.

Fred Weedon has never expanded on the remark he made to Joe Caputo at the coffee machine on the third floor of the courthouse. He might have been serious, or he might have been joking. Ray Clever had a somewhat similar exchange with Weedon in which Ruth’s one-time attorney hinted that she had confessed to Rolf Neslund’s murder.

Captain Richard McCurdy, the current president of the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association, was living in Europe when the
Chavez
hit the West Seattle Bridge, but he heard that story and about Rolf’s disappearance from the older pilots like Captains Bill Henshaw and Gunnar Olsborg.
He never knew Rolf Neslund personally, but McCurdy was to have a kind of connection with him.

The
Chavez
had started out life as the
Pacific Carrier,
and then she became the
Chavez,
only to be rechristened the
Bahia Magdalena
after her bridge damages were repaired. On the afternoon of February 17, 1993, Mc-Curdy was headed to serve as pilot for the
Bahia Magdalena.

“It was Rolf’s old ship,” McCurdy recalled. “It had a comparatively small rudder and it was a little hard to control. I was taking it up the Duwamish that night to the gypsum mill, the same route that Rolf had piloted in 1978. I heard on my car radio that Ruth Neslund had died in prison. I had a strong feeling that Rolf’s hand was on my shoulder that night.”

Indeed, Rolf Neslund’s spirit may still visit ships at sea or coming into dicey harbors; it would seem natural for a man who spent most of his life at sea, saving many lives and shepherding ships into port. And even today, there are some who live in the San Juan Islands who believe that Rolf Neslund did not die in “Shangri-La” at all, but managed to escape from his wife to live out his days in relative peace in the homeland he loved and returned to visit so many times.

Today, of course, if he should still be alive, he would be 106 years old. That he lived beyond the age of eighty in some Valhalla in Norway is possible, but hardly likely. Most people believe as I do that Rolf died in seconds, shot twice in the head by a woman who wanted him gone forever, so that she could have all his money and property, and that his body was, indeed, dissected into manageable pieces and burned to ashes. Ruth outlived him by thirteen years. Whether either of them occasionally returns
to haunt the eight acres on Alec Bay that they once treasured is a question no one can answer.

Their story has been consigned to the lore of the islands, seeming, somehow, to be fiction.

But it is fact.

Were it not for the relentless detective work of men like Ray Clever, Joe Caputo, Greg Doss, Perry Mortensen, Sheriff Ray Sheffer, and Bob Keppel, and the superior prosecutorial work of Charlie Silverman and Greg Canova, Ruth Neslund probably would never have been arrested, much less convicted. Fortunately, they never gave up.

No one who lived in the San Juan Islands in the 1980s has forgotten the Neslund case. Evidence from the trial is on display at the Historical Society in Friday Harbor— even including the bath mat near the tub where Rolf was allegedly dissected.

On a Saturday night in October 2003, seventeen years after Ruth was convicted, many of those involved in the trial had a reunion. The
“State of Washington
v.
Nettie Ruth Neslund
—Revisited” function was held in the San Juan Island Courthouse, with a reception following at the San Juan Historical Museum, where attendees could view the “Law and Disorder” exhibit there.

Since island dwellers who were interested were also invited, more than a hundred people showed up. The panel discussion in the courthouse included attorneys, deputy sheriffs, and jurors who were involved in the investigation and trial of Ruth Neslund. The original twelve-member jury had shrunk in the interim. Four of them had died and one had moved far away to Georgia.

Many of the half dozen jurors who attended had lingering questions about some of the facts of the case that had not come out in court. Charlie Silverman led them through the Neslund case once more, this time more able to answer their questions than he had been during the weeks of trial. They had never known much about Ruth’s background before she came to Lopez. And that was as it should be in a murder trial.

Ray Clever repeated his opinion that “Ruth was without a doubt the most evil ‘bad guy’ I’ve ever dealt with in my thirty-five-year career. They were nasty people—we called Ruth’s brother Bob ‘Butcher Bob.’”

Clever spoke of the forensic techniques that revealed the many bloodstains in the Neslunds’ home, and Juror Dick Saler told the rapt audience, “The forensic stuff was so critical.”

Clever explained to the crowd how close Ruth and her brother had come to being caught twenty-three years earlier. The investigator had eventually learned that Bob Myers had passed sections of Rolf Neslund’s body out the bathroom window, and used nearly a cord of wood to fuel the fire in the burn barrel as he cremated his brother-in-law. Then the burn barrel was loaded into Bob Myers’s pickup truck to be disposed of. However, as Bob was pulling out of the Neslund driveway, a sheriff’s car drove past.

“This scared him,” Clever said, “so he took the burn barrel up into the woods and buried it. We never did find it.”

Those who were brave enough studied the trial artifacts on display at the Historical Society, including the wheelbarrow used to carry Captain Rolf’s remains to the burn barrel. There were still faint bloodstains on the rim, as there were on the bathroom carpet.

For those attending and for most jurors, it seemed as if Nettie Ruth Neslund’s trial had ended only a year or two before. “It will stay with us forever,” Lisa Boyd commented.

Lisa had been called again for jury duty in 2001. Charlie Silverman was, once more, the prosecutor—this time in a child molestation case. Lisa became the jury foreman, the others deferring to her experience gleaned from Ruth Neslund’s trial.

And, as he has done so many times since then, Silver-man elicited a guilty verdict from the 2001 jury.

When I watched the Oscar awards in the spring of 2006, the “best song award” went to a group of rappers whose sentiments I found totally wrong. The winning song? “It’s Hard Out There for the Pimps.” The audience of stars and Hollywood A-List people clapped and cheered when the winners were announced, but I wondered what we had all come to. While I admired the group’s enthusiasm and joy at receiving an Oscar, I wondered if they had any idea what they were really extolling.

A day or two before the Oscar ceremony, I watched an Oprah show in which she featured the star of a nominated movie—
Hustle and Flow
—in which the “pimp song” was featured. He told Oprah that he had done extensive research for his role by interviewing a number of pimps. “I found them rather sweet,” he said. And Oprah, despite being a long-time supporter of underdogs and hapless women, nodded approvingly.

I could not believe my ears! The song’s lyrics say that pimps have no other choice but to practice their trade, but I don’t buy it. After writing about naive teenagers and desperate grown women whose safety, dignity, and hope have been sacrificed to men who treat them badly, I readily
admit that I’m prejudiced against pimps. When I talk to working girls—a euphemism for prostitutes—they confide that they never set out to walk the streets. They listened to heady promises from seductive men about how great their lives would be, and most of them have been reduced to taking terrible chances night after night just to make enough money to pay for a cheap motel, a “Cup-of-Soup,” or a McDonald’s hamburger for supper. That is about the only thing they do for themselves. Almost everything they earn by having sex for money goes to support the men who once claimed to love them.

I won’t equivocate: I don’t like pimps. They sit in cocktail lounges, wearing expensive leather jackets, big-brimmed hats, flashy clothes, and “bling,” while their stables of young women stand out in the rain trying to make enough money to please them, or at least to avoid making them angry.

Most pimps attract women by picking vulnerable victims and, initially, making them feel important and cherished. Sadly, by the time the women realize that the pimps don’t love at all, it’s often too late for them to escape. They have become mere chattel and they have no money of their own. They are trapped in a nightmare existence.

After writing
Green River, Running Red,
my opinion of the men who put their women out on the infinitely dangerous highways around Seattle dropped even lower. Many of them faked grief and remorse for the dozens of young women lost to a vicious serial killer, but I didn’t believe them. Too often, they seemed to revel in the media spotlight, basking in the attention shown them by reporters as they mimicked concern. Soon, they all had fresh recruits working for them.

I happened to be writing the case that follows at the
time I watched the 2006 Oscars. It seemed fitting that I should speak up for the girls of the street that I’ve met, and the hundreds I’ve never known beyond seeing their sad photographs in the newspaper or on television beneath captions that read “Prostitute Murder Goes Unsolved,” or something bleakly similar.

So, I say, “No, it’s not hard out there for the pimps. It’s hard out there on the girls who work for them.” In the following cases, the tables were sometimes turned, with the weak striking back at those in power. I don’t believe that murder is ever justified—except in cases of self-defense or in the defense of others who are unable to protect themselves. But this next case may well have been terrifying enough to make the desperate women in Seattle justified in striking back—before they, too, became targets of a brutal sexual criminal.

It was the first day
of June. After a long, long winter, it should have been sunny, but the day dawned bleak and cloudy that year with the threat of a storm. The weather was the least concern of the terribly injured girl who crawled slowly from her concrete prison in the basement of a condemned building on Melrose Avenue in Seattle. Something was awfully wrong with her—something she couldn’t quite focus on—and billows of what seemed like dark smoke kept blotting out her vision as she inched her way up worn steps. The sidewalk wasn’t far, but it seemed a football field away to her. She didn’t realize that she was completely naked; what reasoning power remained in her pain-befogged brain told her that she had to get someone to help her.

When she struggled to get to her feet, she fell—she didn’t know how many times. Finally she gave up and scrambled crablike on her hands and knees, moving forward only by inches through the overgrown shrubbery that blocked the dirt path from the busy street beyond. She was headed for The Melrose, a once-grand apartment built in the 1920s. Surely, once she got to the street, someone would see her and call an ambulance.

Through sheer force of will, the girl made it to the sidewalk.
Through her blurry eyes, she could make out the form of a well-dressed, middle-aged woman approaching.

“Please...” she begged. “I’ve been hurt. Please help me—”

The woman glanced at her with a combination of distaste and suspicion, and edged away. And then, incredibly, the woman quickened her pace and walked off without looking back.

The teenager crawled over to the grass-level basement window of the apartment building and rapped frantically on the window. But no one came. She began to black out once more and waves of nausea washed over her before she passed out again. When she came to, she was lying on the hard sidewalk. Then she saw a male passerby.

“Help me,” she pleaded. “Please help me.”

The man, too, ignored her.

She began to wonder if she was invisible and realized that she was probably going to die. Nobody could hurt this bad and live; perhaps she was already dead—that would explain why no one was listening to her. But then she saw another man move cautiously toward her. He stood there, watching her. Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe he could see her, after all.