No Regrets (7 page)

He had no idea how wrong he was. Nor did anyone else.

It was midafternoon
on that blustery February day, but Ray Clever noted the magnificent view as they approached the Neslund home, passing the McKay Harbor Inn, where off-islanders were glad to pay the upscale prices for gourmet meals, and then turning down the lane to the sprawling red house set close to the water. Ruth Neslund welcomed the deputies and invited them in. She was a matronly looking woman with short, dyed hair set in a tightly curled permanent, her eyes magnified behind her glasses. She had carefully applied bright red lipstick. She didn’t appear nervous and she was pleasant enough. Her home was warm, clean, and decorated comfortably.

The two deputies explained why they had come—just to check on how her husband was doing. Ruth assured them that Rolf certainly wasn’t missing. “He’s gone,” she said cryptically, “but he’s not missing.”

She told them calmly that she knew perfectly well where her husband was, and there was no reason for anyone to be concerned.

Sighing, she spoke to the deputies in a confidential tone. She admitted that her marriage was going through a rough patch. By mutual agreement, she and Rolf were technically separated—but only while they worked things out. Clever studied her face as she talked. She anticipated
their questions, quickly filling any silences that might be awkward with what seemed to him far too many words. She was quite animated, but something rankled them. Her explanations about her husband’s whereabouts were much too detailed. Clever thought that Ruth Neslund was telling them far more than she needed to, as if she was trying too hard to be convincing. He wondered if she might even have planned what she was going to say if anyone asked.

Clever had a lawman’s “hinky” feeling about the situation, wondering if it was possible that his very first call on his new job might not involve far more than a marital spat. To be on the safe side, Doss and Clever agreed that Ruth Neslund should be advised of her rights under the Miranda Law.

Clever read each clause, and she shook her head willingly, almost impatiently. She knew she didn’t have to talk with them, that she could have an attorney present if she wanted, and if she couldn’t afford one, the county would pay to have one appointed.

“Are you willing to talk with us?” Clever asked.

“Of course,” she said.

Ruth explained that Rolf had left their home on Monday, August 11, 1980—a little more than six months earlier. After consulting a calendar, she changed her statement a little.

“You know, it might have been the Thursday after that—the fourteenth,” she mused. “I really can’t remember which. I recall that he took his clothes, and he wanted some of the furniture. But he never came back to get it.”

Ruth said that she had come across Rolf’s favorite vehicle—his Lincoln Continental—in the employees parking lot of the ferry dock over on the Anacortes side of the ferry run. But that had occurred by chance some two or three
weeks after Rolf walked out on her. She had then arranged to bring the car back to their residence.

Considering that they had been married for almost twenty years, it seemed odd that Ruth was so sanguine about her longtime husband’s disappearance, but she continued to discuss the precise details of his leavetaking in a dispassionate way. It was as if he had only stepped out to go to the store for milk and bread, never to return.

Maybe she had grown tired of their relationship; perhaps she had come to accept that he wasn’t coming back to her in the six months since he’d left her. Different people face life-changing events in their own way. Clever didn’t know Ruth at all; she might just be a stoic woman, long since grown used to disappointment in her life.

Ruth told them that she was pretty sure she knew why Rolf had left her. She had always suspected that he was sneaking around with a woman named Elinor Ekenes, his old girlfriend from way back in 1961. She’d been suspicious of their relationship for as long as she could remember. In fact, she believed that Rolf was currently with Elinor—the two of them flying away together.

“Rolf’s gone off to Norway with Elinor,” she said firmly. “I did my best. I followed him all the way to Norway. I took Flight 726 on Scandinavian Airways.”

“When was that?” Clever asked.

“I think it was on October 10,” Ruth said. “I spent two days in Norway looking for him. But I didn’t find them.”

No, she said she hadn’t contacted any of his family members in his native country because she didn’t think they’d know where he was.

Clever jotted the information about her flight to Norway in his notebook. “Fine,” he said, smiling. “We can check on that and you’ll be on the list of passengers.”

As he glanced up, he saw that the lines in Ruth Neslund’s face had suddenly rearranged themselves into a mask of shock. “She was really startled,” he recalled. “Her face just dropped and her mouth hung open. She hadn’t expected anyone to follow up on what she told us. She figured we’d just go away and be satisfied with her version of where her husband was.”

A man in his fifties—or even sixties—might be expected to leave his wife and a comfortable home in a midlife crisis and take off with another woman. But eighty? It didn’t ring true to either Greg Doss or Ray Clever, and Ruth Neslund noticed their doubt.

Her answers became much more guarded as they questioned her about her flight to catch Rolf with her rival. She wasn’t giving nearly as many details, and her hands fluttered nervously in her lap as they continued to ask more specific questions about why Rolf had left—and when.

Doss and Clever spent about half an hour in the Neslunds’ home, with the interview growing more stilted as the minutes passed. Ruth had gradually turned toward Greg Doss, whose questions weren’t as accusing, dismissing Ray Clever. It was apparent that she didn’t care for Clever or his constant note-taking.

When they left, she was far less animated than she had been. As they drove away, Clever remarked to Doss, “I don’t know whether she killed him or not, but she did something to him, and she’s lying to us.”

They were back at the Neslund house the next day. Ray Clever read Ruth her Miranda rights again, and asked if she would be willing to continue their conversation. Ruth seemed somewhat more relaxed than she had been when they left. Again, she said, “Of course.”

The investigators proceeded, deliberately giving the
impression that they believed that Rolf Neslund might have left of his own accord, but could subsequently have had an accident or even died of a stroke or heart attack. Clever asked Ruth if she had a current photograph of her husband, and she gestured toward several color photos on an end table. They were mostly family pictures, showing Ruth and Rolf together at different stages in their marriage, or with other family members.

It looked as though Ruth might have been feeling sentimental about her marriage because there was a projector set up with a screen in the living room. Several slides of happier days lay near the projector.

She picked out two pictures of Rolf and handed them to Ray Clever. “This looks like him now,” she said.

Ruth began another long and rambling monologue on her suspicions of where he might be. It was difficult to break into her opinions, but Clever interrupted her. “Can you give me any information about your husband that would help us identify him—even if he should not be alive now?”

She stared at him, as if it had never occurred to her that Rolf might be dead. “Well, he has some tattoos—old tattoos,” she said. “On his right forearm, he has a heart with an arrow through it—and it says ‘Muriel’ above it. That was some girlfriend he had a long time ago. She’s dead now.

“And on his left forearm, he’s got something that looks like a Coast Guard insignia, or maybe it’s an American flag. And on the middle finger of his right hand, there’s an arrow tattooed around that finger.”

Ruth remembered myriad details about her missing husband. When Clever asked her if there were dental X-rays available for Rolf, she shook her head. “His teeth are
false—both uppers and lowers. Dr. Sam Anderson made them. His office is on Northwest Eighty-fifth in Seattle. And he had prescription glasses from Dr. Heffernan at the PayLess Drugstore at Thirty-fifth and Aurora.”

According to Ruth, it was also quite possible that Rolf had once had two broken fingers. “I think Elinor broke them once in her lawyer’s office in Canada. He never got them treated, as far as I know.”

Now Ruth began to talk about Elinor again, going into detail about all the legal problems she had endured because of Elinor and her attorneys. Whether she was questioned about her alleged love rival or not, Ruth was determined to bring Elinor into the conversation.

“Have you had any letters or calls from Elinor or her attorneys recently?” Ray Clever asked her.

“No,” she said firmly. “Of course not. That’s ridiculous, because I have nothing to do with her.” Ruth re-emphasized her lack of communication with Rolf’s one-time fiancée.

“Anything else about Rolf that makes him stand out?” Clever asked.

Ruth half-smiled as she told Clever that Rolf was bow-legged. “Too many years of riding decks on the ocean.” He also had a split diaphragm, an injury that he sustained when he was a young man and lifted a heavy log.

Ruth Neslund was clearly a woman with a keen memory, and a talent for minutiae. Whatever their differences, she had known her husband well.

She listed his clothing sizes: “Jacket, 41 chest; shirt, 15½ neck, 33 sleeve; pants, 35 waist, 29 inseam. He wore size 9½ shoe, and a 6⅞ hat.”

She suggested that the investigators check Elinor Ekenes’s house to see if Rolf had his clothes stored there. She recalled that Rolf had a particular set of cuff links that
he always wore with his French cuff shirts. “They were Viking ships. He had other cuff links, too, but I never saw him without the Viking ship ones.”

Clever asked if they might look at Rolf’s jewelry box— still at the Neslunds’ home—to see if he had left anything behind. But Ruth kept talking as if she hadn’t heard him. After he’d asked her several more times, she finally agreed to lead the deputies to the box. When Clever glanced in, he saw at once that the Viking ship cuff links that she had just described were among her husband’s left-behind jewelry. There was also a very expensive man’s watch with a broken metal wristband.

When Doss and Clever found the cuff links that she’d insisted Rolf was never without, Ruth became very nervous. Her voice quavered and her hands shook as she tried to backpedal on her own remarks. She began to talk again about the histories of the cuff links and the watch. She clearly wanted to show that she and Rolf had been very close and that she had been a huge part of his life, at least until their recent arguments.

“Could you tell us a little more about the day that your husband left?” Clever asked her. “What did he say?”

“Well, he said, ‘I’m not coming back.’ Or he might have said ‘I’ll be back after the first of the year—if ever!’”

The more she talked, the more she raised the deputies’ suspicions. Ruth said she knew there had been gossip on Lopez. She was well aware that a man who lived on Lopez was spreading rumors that Rolf was dead.

“I made him apologize to me once for gossiping about someone I was supposed to be married to before Rolf.”

But, oddly, Ruth said she hadn’t confronted the man for saying that Rolf was dead. She didn’t comment on why she hadn’t done so.

Ruth Neslund’s conversation skipped along like a stone flung upon the waves.

“Rolf drinks like a European, you know,” she said. “That means beer in the morning almost every day, sherry in the afternoon, and several highballs before dinner, and then wine and Aquavit with dinner.”

She explained that all that drinking only made Rolf’s diabetes worse. “And it made his blood toxic, too,” Ruth said firmly. “That’s why I tried to make excuses for him when he started hitting me. He never remembered later about fighting with me.”

After two visits from Clever and Doss in two days, Ruth Neslund was becoming more agitated and more talkative, but she wasn’t giving much information that was helpful about where her husband might be six months after he reportedly stalked out of their home, saying either that he was never coming back, or that he might be back after the first of the year. It was now the end of February. The “first of the year” had come and gone.

Ruth was also angry. “She phoned our undersheriff, Rod Tvrdy,” Clever said. “She admitted to him that she might have embroidered some of the things she told us, but she said that was because she didn’t like the ‘California detective’s’ questions, so she’d made some things up.”

Ruth had singled Clever out as her least-favorite deputy, and she particularly resented what she considered his “arrogant California attitude.” What she did not know was she had previously dealt with another investigator from California: Joe Caputo, Greg Doss’s former partner.

“Ruth always liked me,” Joe Caputo recalled. “She evidently didn’t know where I was from . . .”

•  •  •

Joe grew up in Old Town in San Diego, and then in Escondido and San Marcos. He didn’t start out wanting to be a cop; he went to school to be a dental technician. Even though he eventually had his own dental lab, he admitted to himself that he’d never been “all that interested” in dental work. A cousin was a reserve officer for the Escondido Police Department and Joe joined, too.

“I realized then,” he said, “that that was what I really wanted to do.”

He was on several departments’ waiting lists for entry-level positions in southern California when he made a trip to Lopez Island to visit his cousin who was working as a San Juan County deputy. Ironically, the cousin went back to work as a dental tech, and in 1978 Joe replaced him. Like Clever, Caputo was single and didn’t mind being either on patrol or on standby for forty-eight-hour shifts as there were only two deputies assigned to Lopez. One was off-duty while the other was on.

“I liked Lopez and the unique people there,” Caputo recalled. “I must have had fifteen places where I could count on a cup of coffee or a piece of pie. I enjoyed my time on Lopez. I stopped by Rolf and Ruth’s place a number of times for a brief visit or to pick up some flats of strawberries that Ruth was selling.”