And, yes, Ruth had transferred close to one hundred thousand dollars from their joint accounts into accounts in her name only. But that was only wise business sense. “She wanted to avoid possible losses that might come from the bridge accident.”
A successful lawsuit could have wiped the Neslunds out financially.
The blood found in the house was just as easy to explain, Fred Weedon pointed out. During their fights, the Neslunds had drawn blood. Moreover, there had been accidents during the time that Ruth and those she hired built the house in 1976-78.
As for the .38-caliber revolver that the state dubbed the murder weapon, Weedon promised to present witnesses who would stipulate that that gun wasn’t even purchased until December 1980—four months after the alleged murder date.
Weedon’s opening remarks were compelling. He was describing the case from the other side of the looking glass, and it was riveting to hear his “What if?” arguments that demanded jurors and court-watchers consider that Ruth Neslund might be a totally innocent woman who had been widowed through no fault of her own.
From where Fred Weedon sat, Ruth wasn’t perfect, but she had done what she could—allegedly at Rolf’s instigation to protect their retirement money. And Rolf—far from being the content retired man—was, instead, a suicidal, depressed, fading image of the robust man of his youth.
And then, Weedon suggested, Rolf would have suffered a crushing blow to learn that Elinor would not be waiting for him in Norway, but on her honeymoon with another man. Would that not have been enough to make an old man take his own life?
Perhaps. But the defense position on the blood evidence was hard to believe. It was difficult to envision that much blood flung, spattered, dripped, sprayed, and even vaporized from “building accidents” and domestic fights. Rod Englert had specified that the amount of blood that had soaked into the concrete slabs was so profuse that it remained there despite being treated with chemicals and scraped with a grinder. The Portland detective said there was “a large quantity of blood, consistent with very major artery bleeding.” As the Neslunds fought, they had drawn blood by scratching each other, and left bruises, but “arterial bleeding”? No.
Nevertheless, Weedon and Connelly began the defense by questioning witnesses who said Rolf Neslund had been a different man after the bridge accident, a man likely to commit suicide. After the Coast Guard had found him negligent in his duty as a pilot, he had changed.
Acquaintances, men from Lopez Island, and those who had known him elsewhere or worked with him followed one another to the witness stand. They spoke of his supposed despair because he had been forced to retire from the career he loved.
“He’d been in it all his life,” one man said. “[After the accident], the best way I can describe it is a whipped dog, a deflated ego.”
Another said, “I think he was a lot different person after the accident. You could tell he was depressed and upset about it.”
A fellow pilot, Captain Roy Quinn, testified that he had visited Rolf in February 1980, and Rolf told him that he was being named in a lawsuit seeking damages for the West Seattle Bridge. When Quinn warned him to be careful, and find somewhere to put his pension fund where it couldn’t be touched, Quinn said Rolf had answered, “Mama and I have taken care of that. In my own name, I don’t have a dime anymore.”
Quinn felt that Rolf had been “disturbed” after the Chavez hit the West Seattle Bridge. “When we were talking one on one, he was depressed. When there were other people around, he put up a front.” He added that Rolf had been forgetful and would sometimes “blank out.”
“My father-in-law had similar spells, when he was in his eighties. And then he committed suicide. I told Rolf about that. He said to me, ‘I think I’d do the same thing.’”
One defense witness bolstered Ruth’s claim that Rolf had left her of his own accord. “He told me he was going to Norway in early August,” the man testified. “He said, ‘I’ll be back before the holidays, and if I decide to stay longer, I will.’”
On cross-examination, this witness argued continually with Greg Canova. Ignoring courtroom protocol and Judge Bibb’s repeated warnings, the witness offered his opinion without being asked a question. “I don’t want to get intimidated by lies,” he shouted at Canova. “You’re getting the cart before the horse!”
When he complained to Fred Weedon about Canova, saying, “This sucker’s trying to nail me and he ain’t going to nail me,” Judge Bibb told Weedon if he could not control his witness, he would find him in contempt of court.
After a sudden recess, the witness stopped offering comments, but he refused to budge on his stance that, as far as he was concerned, Rolf Neslund had gone to Norway.
A man named John Norman who had done odd jobs for the Neslunds swore on his oath that he had seen Rolf two days after the day he was supposed to have been shot to death. Norman was convinced he had seen Rolf riding the ferry to Anacortes on August 10. He was sure of the date because he and a friend were going to McDonald’s to celebrate the friend’s birthday.
At this point in his testimony, the witness began to cry, explaining that his friend had died since then. But he knew that date, and he saw Rolf Neslund sitting in the backseat of a car between a Lopez Island couple.
“He said, ‘Hi Boss.’ That’s his nickname for me. He was kinda pale and he looked tired.”
“You’re certain that it was Mr. Neslund?” Weedon asked.
“Absolutely.”
But Norman wasn’t so sure on cross-examination by Greg Canova, who asked him if he and his friend often went to Anacortes to eat at McDonald’s. He allowed that that was true.
“Isn’t it true that you testified at a special inquiry hearing that the last time you saw Rolf Neslund was in 1979?”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Norman said somewhat vaguely. He was not an ideal witness.
Weedon called a workman who had helped Ruth build her house a few years before Rolf vanished. He recalled that he had smashed his thumb and cut his hand and dripped blood both times. Interestingly, he recalled the location of his bloodletting was in Ruth’s bathroom, and along the hallway where the search warrant team had isolated blood the state said was Rolf’s.
In a surprise move, the defense called Elinor Ekenes! She seemed an unlikely witness for Ruth’s side, but she had to respond to a subpoena to appear. At first, she recalled, Rolf had made jokes about the ship accident and he hadn’t considered it a tragedy at all. It was his relationship with Ruth that made him “very unhappy.”
Elinor acknowledged that Rolf had spoken about his will when she talked to him on July 27, 1980. He wanted to change it. “He said, ‘I want you and the boys to get whatever I have left.’”
She also said that Rolf had been afraid of how he might die, and that he asked her to see that he had an autopsy to determine the cause if he passed away.
It was doubtful that Elinor helped the defense.
Twenty-one
If possible, the courtroom was even more jammed with spectators than it had been earlier. On December 6, 1985, Ruth Neslund herself emerged from the elevator to encounter a gaggle of television cameras and reporters. Her son, Butch Daniels, was there from Louisiana to help her, and her attorneys flanked her protectively. She turned away from the microphones held out in the hope that she would give some memorable quote, and made her way slowly to the courtroom, leaning heavily on her four-footed steel cane. Her hair, a mixture of stark white and iron gray was straight and cut in a short, mannish style now, parted on the side. Her clothing was quite suitable for a heavy-set woman of sixty-five. She still wore the dark blue polyester slack suit that had become familiar to the gallery. She had changed only her blouses—from ruffled white to prints. Sometimes, she added a scarf, and she did on this day.
Facing the possibility of life in prison if she failed to convince her jurors of her innocence, Ruth seemed confident. At times, she was very serious and, when it seemed appropriate, she used a little humor.
/> She had told reporters a few days earlier that she “could hardly wait” to take the stand, and laughingly teased them by saying they should have followed her to the bathroom with their cameras. She seemed almost to enjoy being the center of attention.
Now, as she faced the gallery and its rows of acquaintances and strangers who seemed to lean forward in anticipation about what she had to say, Ruth Neslund stared back, her face arranged in an unfathomable mask.
She would seldom waver in her answers to Fred Wee-don’s questions, although, when she did, it was usually about specific dates. Not facts.
Once more, Ruth described the night when her husband had left her to go to Norway. She believed that he had arranged to join Elinor, the mother of his two sons. “He told me that she was going, and he was going, and I assumed they would go together or get together once they got there,” she testified. It was something that she had to accept, something she had feared for many years. She spoke now of the way their marriage had disintegrated after Rolf retired.
“He was allowed to retire gracefully and could keep his papers without surrendering his license. After he retired, our relations changed considerably. Communications fell off substantially,” Ruth said. “He would not stay in the same room [with me], and he would go off by himself.”
She recalled that she was frequently left alone in the few months prior to Rolf’s deserting her. “He would take trips to the mainland and be gone for days sometimes.”
Asked about his state of mind, Ruth didn’t use the word depressed. But she had seen a change in him after the bridge incident. “He did a lot of daydreaming. He lost a lot of his whistle and sing,” she said. “His big concern was being sued over the bridge accident. He was afraid we would lose everything we had to the City of Seattle.”
What they had enjoyed together during their twenty years of marriage was gone, and she had accepted that. And with Rolf’s disintegration, their financial picture changed, too. She had always been in charge of their money, even before they were married. She estimated that about $120,000 had been “piddled away” during the first year of Rolf’s retirement. “Sometimes he threatened to take the money and put it in kroner.”
Ruth said she had tried to loan money for the interest and to make investments to keep them from bankruptcy. “He was very careless with money—he’d cram wads of it in his pockets—but he’d never take money directly from me. If I gave him a twenty, for instance, he wouldn’t take it from my hand. I would have to cash checks and put money in his dresser drawer.
“He never wanted to be involved. He wouldn’t even know how to balance a checkbook.”
Fred Weedon asked Ruth how Rolf got the money for his flight to Norway, and she answered easily. “He said he had plenty of money already in Norway. When I asked him how he got it there, he said it was none of my business.”
Ruth Neslund and her attorney were characterizing her as a loyal, commonsense woman who had been at her wits’ end trying to save what she and her husband had worked many years to build. It was an effective stance. And now Weedon opened up the matter of excessive alcohol consumption in the Neslunds’ house of cards. There was no avoiding it, and it was wise of him to encourage her to talk about it, in hopes of defusing the state’s description of her probable alcoholism. Her own lawyer asked her to describe the exacerbation of her dependence upon drinking.
She nodded sadly. Drinking had been a constant thing in their home. “We called it the house that beer built,” she said, “because we supplied a case of beer daily for those working on the house.” (That in itself might explain why Ruth’s workmen had so many accidents on the job . . .)
“We did do heavy drinking and drank too much every day. It sharpened the resentments Rolf had. He felt pretty much cooped up after his retirement and that would come out. He would make us drinks and then say, ‘Drown yourself.’ That would antagonize me and I’d say, ‘You drown yourself.’ This would lead into stinking little arguments which would grow into physical fights—up to three or four a month. We’d get up the next morning and sometimes not even remember the fights, except we saw our broken glasses, our bruises, a broken tooth, a broken lamp. We’d get along great in the morning. It was like the fights never happened...”
Ruth’s testimony was not unlike the self-revealing admissions often heard at AA meetings. With Weedon’s careful questioning, she was baring her soul. She said she hadn’t thought of herself as an alcoholic in the summer of 1980, but in retrospect, she thought she must have been. She had been blind to so many things that happened. She, Rolf, and most of their friends drank continually.
Still, she recalled setting a limit for herself of three drinks a day. If she poured herself a fourth, she called it “a boomer,” and said that she never drank that one.
Ruth wasn’t surprised that a lot of bloodstains were located in her house. She had long suffered from high blood pressure, and often had nosebleeds (a common side effect). Sometimes, she had saturated up to four hand towels before she could manage to stop the bleeding.
Ruth had an even more elaborate explanation for how Type A Positive blood was found in the shower door frame of her bathroom. In yet another “household accident,” Rolf had cut his fingers on a table saw. He was bleeding profusely, and Ruth said she had tried to take him to a medical clinic. He refused to go until he had taken a shower. “I told him to hold his hand in the air to keep it from bleeding [in the shower].”
There was the matter of Ruth’s strange comments at the Puget Sound Pilots’ party in January 1981. Why had Ruth said, “Rolf is in heaven”?
“Oh,” she said with a faint smile, repeating a story she had told the sheriff. “I meant that to mean he was in Norway, because to my husband to be in Norway is to be in heaven! Never, by the wildest stretch of my imagination could I imagine Rolf being in God’s heaven. Never...”
Whether she thought him too wicked to be in heaven or she was trying to say he wasn’t dead after all wasn’t clear.
It had been six weeks since the first day of trial when Greg Canova rose to cross-examine Ruth Neslund. Canova was a handsome man in his thirties with black hair and a luxuriant mustache, charismatic in the courtroom. But Ruth viewed him suspiciously.
She was dismissive and incredulous as the special prosecutor asked her about her alleged phone calls to her niece, Joy Stroup. Ruth said she had no recollection of those. When Canova asked her, “You don’t recall telling your niece that you wanted to waste Rolf?” Ruth replied, “I’ve never used that word. I wouldn’t know how to use it.”
“You didn’t tell her that you just shot Rolf and he was burning in the burn barrel?”
“I don’t remember that specific call. Why would I say that? No, I didn’t. There was no reason to...You can shout that from the housetops, but it is not true.” And then she added, “I have relatives who would say anything you’d want to hear for forty dollars.”
Ruth said she wasn’t necessarily referring to Joy, but that some of her relatives could be bought. She said she might have made some phone calls on August 8. “I was upset and hurting because I knew Rolf was leaving. I got into my cups during those days, too. I think I drank quite a lot when I knew he was going.”
As for Donna Smith, Joy’s sister, Ruth was angry at her betrayal, but she didn’t remember any phone conversations or particular incidents.
“Didn’t you, in fact, call her and tell her you were going to be sending her thirty pieces of silver, a reference to the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas for betraying Jesus?” Canova pressed.
“No. I wouldn’t have said that because I don’t consider her a real Christian,” Ruth sniffed.
Ruth herself wasn’t known for churchgoing; still, she took on a pious look.
Even though Greg Canova pointed out that Ruth had given different testimony in many areas in earlier hearings, she remained unruffled—and gave new explanations.
Now, after hearing Paul Myers testify against her about what he had heard her say regardi
ng Rolf’s murder and the disposal of his body, Ruth deemed her brother “a pathological liar,” and a thief, a heavy drinker, whom she had rescued from his filthy living quarters and tried to rehabilitate on Lopez Island.
But hadn’t she praised Paul earlier in earlier hearings? Canova asked. “You said you were closer to Paul than to your other brothers and sisters?”
“I must say that I had mixed up pity for love,” she answered quickly.
If she had given different testimony at the special inquiry hearing in 1981, in the areas Canova specified—and, indeed, she had—she explained that was because she had been “confused” at the time.
Ruth Neslund was implacable on the witness stand. She had an explanation for everything, even though her reasoning and answers didn’t mesh with what she had said in the years just past, or with the physical evidence. She admitted only to being a too-trusting wife who was about to be abandoned, and to drinking too much in an effort to block out her emotional pain.
As for murder? No one had ever found even a smidgen of Rolf’s body. He was alive when he left her, and for all she knew, he might still be alive someplace.
And when Fred Weedon asked her the inevitable and burning question on redirect: “Did you shoot Rolf Neslund?” Ruth spoke clearly and emphatically.
“I did not shoot Rolf.”
Ruth’s son, Warren “Butch” Daniels, testified that his mother hadn’t even purchased the Smith & Wesson .38 that the prosecution said tested positive for blood until after the alleged murder. He insisted that it had been bought in December 1980—four months after Rolf Neslund disappeared. She had bought it from a gun shop in Slidell, Louisiana.
On cross-examination, Canova suggested that it was not the Smith & Wesson she obtained that December and whose receipt was submitted as evidence by the defense, but the Colt Python that was also found in her dresser drawer.
“Mr. Daniels, isn’t it correct that when your mother was there in 1980, the gun you gave her to take back to Seattle for her protection was, in fact, a Colt Python .357 Magnum, and this [Smith & Wesson] gun, this .38 caliber, was one you had given her on one of her earlier visits back in ’79?”