No Regrets (11 page)

Canova and Keppel weren’t taking over—the San Juan County investigators were still principally involved—but the two AG’s men would be there to help, both in the investigation of the Neslund case and to assist in any trial that might evolve.

Joining the two offices together—the attorney general of the State of Washington and the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office—had to be done tactfully. Luckily, they were not adversaries nor did they encounter “turf wars” over which assignments belonged to one or the other. Indeed, Ray Clever and Bob Keppel would have nothing but praise for one another, and Charlie Silverman, recently out of law school and more versed in civil law than criminal proceedings,
said he was relieved to have Greg Canova come on board. The job ahead promised to be difficult and there was every chance that they could not bring charges against anyone because they had no corpse and apparently no witnesses brave enough to come forward and testify in open court.

Investigating disappearances and murders wasn’t something that deputies on a small and mostly friendly island were often called upon to do. They had to keep performing their regular duties, and most of the deputies kept their own files with them. Computers certainly weren’t part of their filing system—nor were they standard equipment in either Seattle or Spokane law enforcement offices at the time.

Ray Clever was a man who made lists. When he found what he sought or finished performing some task he felt essential to his investigation in the Neslund case, he checked it off. And then he made new and longer lists. If what he discovered seemed positive, he wrote “Bingo!” in his notebooks. Initially, he didn’t have many “Bingos!”

Bob Keppel was also a detail man. Known as a brilliant interrogator, Keppel’s other forte is organization. Even when computers were in an embryonic stage when the “Ted” serial killer was still roving in Washington, Oregon, and Utah back in the midseventies, Keppel used a “stone-age” computer to winnow out a half dozen names from a roster of thousands of “Ted” suspects. One of those names was Theodore Bundy.

By 1982 Keppel had mastered the art of organizing information and evidence in criminal cases. He was able to take all the different working files of the San Juan deputies and coalesce the information into a tightly organized narrative of the disappearance of an eighty-year-old man.

•  •  •

The question remained: Could such an impressive lineup of lawmen prevail over one sweet-faced, elderly woman who might, indeed, have a problem with alcohol, but who continued to present herself to the world as a woman scorned, a long-suffering wife betrayed, a lone woman who wanted only to keep her home, grow her flowers, visit with her family, and find some happiness in her “golden years”?

And would Joy Stroup and Donna Smith be brave enough to come forward with what they knew in a court of law?

It had not been
easy for either the lawmen or those who rushed to support Ruth Neslund. The
Journal of the San Juan Islands
and the
Friday Harbor Record
were sometimes thorns in the Sheriff’s Department’s side, continually nagging at them to do something, or even worse, suggesting that they were humorously incompetent.

But they also printed rumors that upset and angered Ruth. Wary now, Ruth “lawyered up,” first with Mitch Cogdill of Everett and then switching to Fred Weedon, who had been in charge of the Public Defender’s Office in Pierce County in Tacoma. Weedon was a savvy criminal lawyer who spent vacations on Lopez Island and Ruth considered him a “neighbor” she could trust.

Cogdill and Weedon were vocal in their criticism of law enforcement. The local papers printed their statements dutifully, and half the county seemed to feel Ruth was being unfairly besieged.

The sheriff’s men were thwarted in their efforts to investigate further. They had followed through on their search warrant back in April 1981, and they’d found nothing. Ruth was now officially Rolf’s trustee, and it looked as though she was going to win her jousting with the Pilots’ Association and continue to receive his eighteen-hundred-dollar-a-month pension.

Rolf’s disappearance was far from an ordinary case, and it had to be worked “backward.” Because there was no body, it didn’t really seem like a murder case. Washington courts had yet to convict a murderer when there was no corpse to establish that a crime had been committed. There was always the possibility that Rolf would come home and that there might even be a happy ending. Even if he was dead, there wasn’t the sense of tragedy about the demise of a man who was somewhere between eighty or eighty-three that there would be if the victim had died young. Rolf had had a good life, a fulfilling life. His reputation as a man who had known many women was familiar to the pilots he worked with over the years. But they also agreed that his libido had probably cooled considerably as he grew older. Still, was it possible that Ruth was on target as she continued to claim he had left her for more sexual dalliance? If Rolf had managed to sneak away with a lover (definitely not Elinor Ekenes, but perhaps some other woman), then he might even serve as a shining example of senior citizen virility to other men of middle age and even beyond.

Both Rolf and Ruth had remained close to their extended families over the years; Ruth had been a second mother to Donna Smith, her niece, and often welcomed other family members for extended visits in the Neslund home. Ruth went back to visit her family in Illinois, Ohio, and Louisiana just as often as, if not more often than, Rolf kept in touch with his siblings in Norway. Despite some of her sisters’ belief that Ruth had “hurried” the death of their mother to collect her insurance, she was still welcomed by other family members in the Midwest. Her
older brother, Robert Myers, was visiting during the summer of 1980, and, as she had said in one of her many statements to deputies, Rolf had asked Robert to look after her as he left.

Robert had been very ill early in 1980 with failing kidneys and prostate trouble, but he had slowly regained his strength after having surgery. He had looked forward to spending many months with Ruth and Rolf, and both of them had welcomed him.

If Rolf had indeed asked Robert to take care of Ruth after he left, Robert apparently had done that. He had remained with Ruth into the autumn months.

Any argument Ruth and her sister Mamie had once had over how to raise Donna Smith had long since been resolved, and Mamie wrote to Ruth often from Mt. Sterling, Ohio. The family letters were normal, like any letters one gets from older relatives. It was hard to imagine that anything as dark as bloody murder could be a part of their lives.

Mamie wrote to Ruth on September 26, 1980: “I was terribly worried about you. I am afraid you are overdoing it. I guess you know why I was so glad you had Bob with you now. I hope you get along all right with him. I’m sure you will.

“Don’t you worry about me. I know I will be allright [sic]. You can let me know how you are ...I know you are worn out. You rest as much as you can.

“I hope you come out ahead with Rolf. It’s a shame he is so greedy.”

(Obviously, Ruth had told her sister that Rolf had left her without funds, and that he was a stingy man.)

Mamie Anderson wrote about her own arthritis, visiting the cemetery to pull weeds from relatives’ graves, and
of various family members who were ailing, in the hospital, poor, or, in some cases, dead.

“Gladys is doing allright. She has no income now—except for [her] Veteran’s Widow’s Pension. She will have to work 3 years before she can get S. Security.”

Ruth promptly sent checks to help out.

It did seem that having her brother Robert with her was a blessing for Ruth. Robert was her escort even to social events. Oddly, Ruth hadn’t mentioned one of the Pilots’ Association parties to Clever and Caputo. Captain Gunnar Olsborg had phoned Ruth and invited Rolf and Ruth to a retirement awards dinner to be held on August 17, 1980—a party where Rolf was to be honored. Ruth had cheerily accepted for them. But when the evening came, Rolf wasn’t there. Ruth brought her brother Robert along instead.

Robert had extended his visit at the Neslund home for some time after Rolf left, but he eventually returned to his home in Beardstown, Illinois. There was a long delay during that trip when none of his relatives heard from him. Ruth and Mamie were worried about where he was. Ruth and her son, Butch, were especially concerned about who he was talking to.

Another brother, Paul Myers, was supposed to be somewhere in the Northwest.

Finally, Robert wrote to say that he had arrived in good shape in Illinois. His letters from the Midwest were just as down-home as Mamie’s, although his spelling and grammar were not up to hers. He wrote to Ruth from Mt. Sterling after he returned home. Ruth had bought him an old log patrol boat so he could fish off Lopez Island. Robert spent a lot of time cutting it in half and rebuilding it, only to find that he could not get it licensed in Washington
State, so he had loaded it onto a trailer Ruth owned and headed for Illinois.

His first letter read:

Robert and his son, Carl, were planning to make money in building a few boats for other fisherman so Robert could finish up his boat. He wrote that they would use ash, elm, oak, and sassafras wood. He seemed elated with his gift from Ruth, and he planned to do a lot of fishing. He wrote of having supper with their shared family, eating “high on the hog” enjoying wild duck and venison.

But Robert’s long trip home from Lopez hadn’t been without mishaps, even at thirty miles an hour. As he explained:

Yes, Ruth Neslund’s health and well-being seemed very important to her family. They worried that she wasn’t well-rested and that she didn’t have enough money. Still, she seemed able to send them checks and to give them magnanimous presents like boats, cars, and checks for college tuition and living expenses.

Ray Clever had heard the rumors that Ruth had said some shocking things to her relatives around the time Rolf disappeared. That was nothing new. For a long time, neighbors had heard her yelling things at her husband like, “I’ll see you dead before you get a cent to give to those bastards!” Whenever she caught Rolf giving money to Elinor or his sons, most of her friends and neighbors knew it. For Ruth, death threats aimed at Rolf weren’t unusual. She was certainly a woman of violent mood swings and she didn’t care who heard her when she was angry.

Although Ruth didn’t want Rolf spending money on his own sons, she had been quite generous with her family, or, rather, it was possible that she was helping certain members of her family financially to assure herself that they would keep any dangerous secrets she had within the family
circle. But as solicitous as she was to Robert, she didn’t seem to care for her brother, Paul, at all.

Paul Myers was a man of the sea, too, but he never reached the pinnacles Rolf had. Paul was rumored to have been in the Merchant Marine, and he sometimes worked fishing boats headed for Alaskan waters. Once, he put together a thick bankroll, but he had entrusted Ruth with his savings when she promised to invest it for him. By 1982 he had been sending her his paychecks and his Social Security checks for some time.

As it turned out, he might as well have put all his money in a pull-tab machine in a tavern. To his dismay, Paul learned that Ruth had spent his money on some land in Whatcom County, but she put the deed in her name and in the name of Ruth’s younger son, Butch. Paul wasn’t listed at all.

Ruth could talk her way out of anything, though, and she managed to convince Paul that she would give him a car she owned to make up for the money she had weaseled away from him. She also promised to send him checks for keeping his mouth shut about her business.

In January 1982, Paul finally smelled the coffee, and, desperate, wrote a last angry letter to Ruth:

Paul showed up on Lopez Island in February 1982, to claim the vehicle that Ruth promised him. However, when he got there, she had changed her mind. She told him the car was gone. He was convinced that Ruth and her neighbor, Winnie Kay Stafford, had colluded to hide it from him. Despite the fact that she was about fifteen years younger than Ruth, the two women were very close friends. Ruth could talk Winnie Kay into almost anything.

A man who knew them both said, “Winnie Kay can be crazy as a hoot owl sometimes. She just got sucked in by Ruth and Ruth’s money.”