Ruth Neslund was proving to be an uncommonly popular woman on Lopez, and she had a crowd cheering for her. Curiously, she became more popular all the time. She didn’t need to hire a publicist; her own comments and those of her attorney, Fred Weedon—who was taking a leave of absence from the Public Defender’s Office down in Tacoma so that she would have solid legal representation—made her image as a “poor old woman” quite believable.
The Seattle Times printed quotes from island citizens who praised Ruth. “I don’t think she had anything to do with his disappearance,” one man said. “She’s too kind-hearted.”
“It was common knowledge that he was going to Norway,” another commented. “Something probably happened to him a long way from here. It didn’t happen on the island. I’m mad as hell at the deputy sheriffs! Why did they wait a year and a half to start tearing up the property?”
“They were just an old couple, and they seemed to get along all right,” a woman eating dinner at a very popular eating spot, the Islander-Lopez Restaurant, told a reporter. She had heard on good authority that Rolf had been seen in Hong Kong.
Someone said that the investigators better have a good reason for “doing what they’re doing. Otherwise [Ruth] will have a lawsuit that won’t quit.”
Disappointed and besieged, the sheriff’s men kept building their case. Ray Clever worked to establish the state of Ruth and Rolf’s relationship, only to end up with twenty-three statement forms from couples and individuals who had known the Neslunds over the years—some through business dealings, and others socially. He was surprised to find that every one of them described Ruth and Rolf as a relatively happy couple, not unlike scores of others on Lopez. What he had would be of more help to the defense than the state.
“Would you testify to that in any trial?” he asked at the end of each interview.
“Yes, of course,” they answered, to Clever’s dismay.
There were those who had once laughed at the Neslunds’ unfortunate dinner parties, but as time passed, even they modified their recollections. It was the deputies who had responded to the “domestic violence” calls who knew how fierce the fights were. They had arrived after the “company” departed and seen how the Neslunds’ arguments had ended with broken crockery all over the floor, and bruises, scratches, lumps, bumps, and even bite marks left on the participants.
But the rumor mills kept churning. Much more than even a small town, everyone on a sparsely populated island seems somehow connected. The evolution of the disappearance of Rolf Neslund as a folk tale was becoming entrenched. The case belonged to Lopez Island, a somewhat suspect bit of popular culture or of island history. Rolf’s vanishing under such eerie circumstances was becoming, as some said, a “tourist attraction.”
The goriest gossip said that Ruth had killed Rolf and reduced him to bits in her meat-grinder; it was a story right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Sweeney Todd. Irreverently, some jokesters referred to Rolf’s alleged death as “The Meat-Grinder Murder,” and whispered that local restaurants would be serving “Rolf Burgers” soon.
Ironically, Lopez Island had long been touted as a most friendly spot where newcomers were welcome, and a tradition had grown where people in cars passing one another always gave a cheerful wave. One entrepreneur ordered dozens of T-shirts and had them silk-screened to show a drawing of a burn barrel with a hand sticking out. Beneath that, words were emblazoned to say, “Wave! You’re on Lopez Island!”
The sheriff’s men didn’t see the humor, and few would blame them. Wherever Rolf was, it was their job to find him, and they weren’t making much progress.
“That’s what got to us the most,” Ray Clever remembers. “Some people didn’t think Ruth was capable of harming Rolf, and others believed she had killed him, but they didn’t care.”
It was disheartening to see how public opinion was gradually swinging over to Ruth Neslund. The public, of course, did not know about the lab results that suggested the Neslund residence had probably been a virtual abattoir at one time. And they didn’t know about what Paul Myers had told Clever. Or about what had happened in the Columbia Tower meeting with Ruth’s nieces, Joy Stroup and Donna Smith. That information, and all the forthcoming information, was sealed tight, waiting for the right moment.
Within the year Fred Weedon would represent Ruth in bringing suit against everyone and anyone connected with the execution of the second search warrant. Ruth was on the offensive, threatening to sue for $750,000 in damages to her home. She claimed poverty and illness, but she exuded confidence as everyone involved in the 1982 search of her property—the San Juan County deputies, the sheriff, the State Attorney General’s Office, and the Washington State Crime Lab—was warned that they might be sued.
If she prevailed, Ruth would have no need to proceed with her bed-and-breakfast business. She could have lived quite comfortably for the rest of her life. Still, she said she looked forward to running her home business.
She just naturally liked people, she said.
Thirteen
The lay public of Lopez Island could not see a motive for a sweet, “kind-hearted” old woman to kill her husband. And the San Juan County sheriff’s investigators and the AG’s Office had to bite their tongues and continue with their probe. They weren’t in a popularity contest; they were looking for the truth and if it turned out to be what they believed it was, they knew the day would come when they could charge Ruth Neslund with murder.
Ruth’s banking records validated what they already suspected. Rolf Neslund had left money matters up to his wife and she had quite probably robbed him blind. He’d always said, “I trust her and she’s better at it than I am.”
In those last few days before he disappeared, Rolf had finally begun to see the first indication of the enormity of his wife’s betrayal He knew that his bank account was almost empty—with too little in it to cash his seventy-five-dollar check. When he talked to Kay Scheffler, he learned that she had paid off her mortgage five years earlier. It was the same with the Ronnings. Ruth had lied to him for at least that long. She had kept the Ronning and Scheffler payoff money without telling him.
Had he remained in the picture, Rolf would have discovered much more. Ruth’s bank statements showed that, silently and secretly, she had been taking money out of their joint accounts for a long time and putting it into individual accounts in her own name—accounts that Rolf could not access.
She had done this quite subtly, taking out relatively small amounts at first, or simply depositing money paid to both of them to her own account. When he didn’t notice these transactions, Ruth grew bolder. For example, on May 1, 1979, she transferred Rolf’s entire pilot’s retirement fund of $78,049.50 into two joint accounts— $50,000 in a certificate of deposit that earned high interest, and $28,049.50 into a savings account.
She waited about seven weeks for Rolf to say something, but of course he didn’t. On June 25, Ruth removed nearly $80,000 from the two accounts and put it into an account in her name only.
By December 1979, she had transferred virtually all their money that had been deposited in their joint account at People’s Bank in Seattle to an account in her name only in the San Juan County Bank.
Rolf knew he was getting his eighteen-hundred-dollar pension every month because Ruth kept putting his spending money in the dresser drawer, and he wasn’t concerned about the rest. He counted on their savings to see them through their last years.
In August 1980, when Rolf tried to cash the check at People’s Bank, he had access to only one joint account there. Its balance: $9.12.
With all their money available to her alone, Ruth had been cashing checks as she liked. She loaned money to some people on mortgages, but when they made payments, again at high interest, those went into Ruth’s private accounts. She shared her largesse with her family, probably assuring herself that they would always take her side.
Moreover, between December 1979 and February 1981, Ruth collected Rolf’s pilot’s pension check
s for eighteen hundred dollars every month, and endorsed them in his name, and then put them in her account. He never noticed. She did the same with his Social Security checks. She would continue to cash both until the Puget Sound Pilots’Association froze them. And then she sued them, too, furious that anyone would interrupt her money sources.
By the time Rolf vanished, the only account in the San Juan Islands where he could cash a check was at the San Juan Bank, where the balance was just forty dollars.
For years, smugly believing she could fool Rolf forever, Ruth easily kept him from discovering that she controlled all their money. It was only when Rolf became so miserable in his marriage that he considered going to Norway forever that he learned he had no money.
The motives for Ruth to want to get rid of her aging husband were quite clear, and as old as time. Money for one, and seething, mindless jealousy for another. With Ruth, the two combined into an even more powerful, conjoined motive. She had hated Elinor Ekenes for twenty years. Although she was misinformed, Ruth probably had convinced herself that Rolf loved Elinor—and not her— and that he was giving Elinor money. Indeed, he was giving her money, but it was for his sons. He wanted to leave something behind for the boys who were his flesh and blood.
Rolf was prepared to leave Ruth if he could, but first he had to get his money back. A confrontation was as inevitable as the collision of the Chavez and the West Seattle Bridge. Once the elements of disaster were in motion, there was no going back.
Rolf was afraid his wife was poisoning him, putting something in his coffee, and he was careful not to drink it or, for that matter, eat what Ruth cooked.
He didn’t know that something infinitely more dangerous was sneaking up behind him.
Fourteen
Almost from the first time Rolf Neslund’s disappearance made headlines in the Seattle papers, the investigators had heard about peculiar stories, stories purportedly originating with Ruth Neslund’s relatives. But even followed back to the source, the information was diluted by Ruth’s tendency to embroider the truth— if not outright lie. That, combined with the things she said when she was intoxicated, meant rumors had to be substantiated with solid physical evidence and believable eyewitnesses.
Ray Clever and Bob Keppel, the criminal investigator from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, realized that a trip to the Midwest to talk to other members of Ruth Neslund’s family was essential.
Keppel and Clever met with Sheriff Carl Wubker at the Cass County seat in Virginia, Illinois. Wubker said that many of Ruth’s nine siblings and their offspring still lived in the area. A lot of the Illinois branch of the Myers clan resided in nearby Beardstown. In their younger days, Ruth’s brother Robert was rumored to have had dealings with Al Capone in Chicago. But that was a long time back and whether it had to do with Prohibition and rum-running or something darker, Wubker wasn’t sure.
Keeping in mind the stories that there were bodies of old-time “Revenooers” (now called Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents) buried down in the swampland near the river, Wubker warned the two lawmen from Washington State. He said they should be careful with the Myers boys because it was rumored that they had “planted” more than one Revenuer in the mud flats. He insisted on sending a captain from his staff to accompany them when they headed out to talk to Ruth’s male kinfolk.
Keppel and Clever wanted to talk to Robert Myers, Ruth’s brother who had been living with the Neslunds when Rolf disappeared. Like his sister and brother, Robert was also short and round as a turnip, an old man so bow-legged that he walked as if he was on the pitching deck of a ship. He had huge arms, but he didn’t seem like much of a threat any longer.
As they attempted to ask Robert about his missing brother-in-law, they immediately observed that Robert’s mind was cloudy. He appeared to be either senile or mentally ill. He might even be suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Robert was nearing eighty now, and his recall of his last visit to Lopez Island was worse than hazy. Moreover, he didn’t want to talk about his sister Ruth or his visits to Washington. Any questioning was a fruitless effort. It was clear that Robert Myers wouldn’t make a competent witness for either the state or the defense.
Robert’s son, Carl, was eminently competent, but he wouldn’t talk to Clever and Keppel at all, and he grew more belligerent with each question. Whatever either man knew about Ruth and Rolf Neslund’s relationship and what might have happened more than two years earlier, Robert couldn’t remember and Carl refused to say.
Frustrated, Keppel and Clever headed back to Washington. They had certainly added to their belief that there were dark secrets in the Myers family. They also suspected that Ruth had been sending checks to be sure that none of them talked to the police about her.
Mamie, Ruth’s oldest sister, was fiercely loyal to her. Long after Rolf left, Mamie continued sending her concerned letters.
“I want you to know, my dear sister,” she wrote, “I love you very much. My heart goes out to you and I think of you most of the time... I am appalled at the things you have had to go through. I love you and pray for you and can only think of the good things you have done. You take care of yourself and remember ‘I love you.’”
It wasn’t surprising that Ray Clever’s phone calls to Mamie’s Ohio home elicited the same stony silence that he and Bob Keppel had encountered in Illinois. Mamie said she didn’t know anything at all about Rolf’s disappearance. She refused to answer any questions.
Ray Clever knew that Ruth was sending checks to Mamie.
There were still, thankfully, two very credible witnesses: Joy Stroup and Donna Smith, Mamie’s daughters. Joy was as concerned as Donna was about the phone calls they had both received from “Aunt Nettie Ruth” on August 8, 1980.
Joy told Ray Clever that she was at work that day, estimating that it was noon in Ohio (3:00 P.M. in Washington State) when her aunt called her. They had a very brief conversation, not more than three minutes.
This was the most shocking recollection of all. This was the dread secret that had been hinted at when Joy’s letter came to the San Juan County detectives through the Pilots’ Association. This was the information that Joy and Donna had given in the secret meeting in Seattle, long sealed now until the Attorney General’s Office team and the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department and Prosecutor Silverman were ready to move.
According to Joy, her aunt Ruth had contacted her in the summer of 1980 and told her that she had shot Rolf and burned his body.
If this shocking news was from anyone else, it surely would have been reported immediately, but Ruth was known for making outrageous phone calls when she was in her cups. Nobody paid much attention to them. Over the previous years, many of her calls had to do with her anger at Rolf, or some fight they had had. She was somewhat like the boy who cried “Wolf!” and it was hard to take her drunken phone calls seriously.
Besides, Ruth’s letters to her family were so typically those of a beloved—if slightly dotty—old aunt. She sent checks to her nieces, her sisters and brothers, and was always there for them.
They had all wanted to believe that basically Aunt Ruth had a good heart.
But her calls in August 1980 had been too explicit to dismiss. Joy Stroup told the investigators what Ruth had said to her. There was little question that Ruth had spoken of killing her husband. “I was very busy at work and I just told her I would call her later,” Joy said. “I didn’t want to believe what she was saying. I thought she had been drinking again.”
Two days went by before Ruth called Joy again, and over those forty-eight hours, Joy felt her first impression was right. Her aunt had been drunk and spouting nonsense as she often did. But then, on August 10, Ruth called again.
“She told me the same thing she did before.”
“Did she ever tell you that was all a big story—say it wasn’t true?” Clever asked.
“No.”
After the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department’s first search of the Neslund proper
ty in April 1981, Joy said Ruth had called her. “She wanted to know if I’d given a statement to the police,” Joy said, “and she said ‘Keep the confidences I have given you.’”
Joy and Donna had been concerned enough that their aunt might not be making her grisly story up that they set out to find Rolf Neslund and make sure he was safe. But they could not locate him. Ruth easily explained why. “She convinced us that he had gone to Norway and that she and Rolf were getting a divorce.”
The young women had wanted to believe Ruth, and she was very convincing when she told them there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Rolf was safe and well— but her marriage was over. Ruth had appeared to be very well off financially, and she was very kind and generous. She wasn’t grieving over the upcoming divorce, and seemed happy enough.
Still, as time passed, it struck Joy as strange that Rolf hadn’t taken his clothes with him when he left. “She offered to send his clothes to me for my husband,” Joy said. “They were about the same size.”
Later, when Joy mentioned to her aunt that her daughter was having trouble with a boyfriend who was “too persistent,” and Joy talked of her own plan to discourage him from bothering the teenager, Ruth said inscrutably, “I know a better way to get rid of him.”
After that phone call, Ruth’s words came back to worry Joy. What had she been trying to say? Joy hated to speculate on the meaning intended. Donna Smith knew that her uncle was alive on August 7 because he called her house. She wasn’t home but he had a brief conversation with her babysitter, who was sixteen.
Joy told Donna about the two phone calls she had received from their aunt on August 8 and August 10, so Donna called Ruth on the eleventh. They exchanged pleasantries, and then Donna asked to talk to Rolf, explaining she was returning his call.
“He’s out,” Ruth said first, “but he should be back in a minute.”
When Donna didn’t hear his voice on the phone, she asked Ruth again where he was.