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.”
Caputo liked both Ruth and Rolf, but he and Greg Doss had been called to settle the Neslunds’ domestic disputes from time to time. “Rolf was always sitting in his ‘Easy Boy’ recliner,” Caputo recalled. “He sat there bleeding from his head and face, and Ruth didn’t show anything in the way of injuries—only those marks that she claimed were burns from her oven.”
Joe Caputo felt that Rolf always got the worst of their fights. “I don’t think that Rolf would ever have hit a woman. Ruth was bigger than he was—she put on weight over the years—but Rolf had these massive forearms. He always reminded me of Popeye; his arms just bulged out beneath his short-sleeved shirt. Ship pilots had to climb from tugboats up maybe fifty, sixty feet onto ships on these rope ladders, lots of times in bad weather. He had to have arms like that to make it.”
When Ruth had been drinking, which was usually the case before the Neslunds’ fights, Caputo found her to be “the type that people would be embarrassed to be around—she wasn’t the ‘kind grandmother type.’ Ruth had many good points to her personality, and she certainly could be entertaining at a get-together,” Caputo said wryly, “but I’m also sure that Adolf Hitler had some good attributes.”
When the Neslunds had one of their fights, it was always Rolf who volunteered to spend the night at the Islander-Lopez Resort’s motel/apartments. “By the next day, they’d be back together,” Caputo remembered.
Joe Caputo was a quiet and thoughtful man who kept his personal opinions hidden. That may have been why Ruth didn’t resent him the way she did Ray Clever.
If Ruth thought that her tattling on them to Sheriff Ray Sheffer would make Doss and Clever back off, she was mistaken. Her indignation only made them more skeptical.
Caught in what were clearly lies, Ruth grew irate at the deputies’ persistence. They were snooping into her personal life, pestering a poor woman whose husband had left her alone, acting as if she had done something wrong when they should have been more sympathetic. She was the one who’d been victimized. She was a longtime resident on Lopez Island and she deserved some respect.
Many of her neighbors echoed her feelings. Yes, there were a few Lopezians who liked to perpetuate rumors, but most people who knew Ruth said they couldn’t imagine that she was capable of doing real harm. She was kind and friendly, and not that different from other island women in their sixties, familiar—even beloved—by some.
Not everyone was pleased to know that the San Juan County sheriff’s deputies were worrying Ruth with their daily visits. A lot of neighborhood women felt sympathy for her. Her health wasn’t that good, and still she had tried to keep her garden up, out there in soggy weather planting bulbs and flowers, or inside cooking for friends. No one to help her with chores, or comfort her when it grew dark at four in the afternoon in the wintertime. Ruth had a good business head, sure, but basically she was only an ordinary woman, aging, fighting weight gains, and now deserted by her husband after twenty years of marriage. Ruth had her sixty-first birthday on February 8. She spent it all alone.
“Rolf didn’t even send her so much as a birthday card,” one woman tsk-tsked. “He always sent cards to everyone, but not to his own wife.”
On February 25, for the third day in a row, a sheriff’s police cruiser turned into the lane leading to the Neslund house. This time, Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy accompanied Deputy Ray Clever. Ruth knew Rod, at least, and felt he would be nicer to her than Ray Clever.
They found Ruth Neslund still maintaining that Rolf had run away with Elinor Ekenes. She embellished her recall of Elinor’s impact on her marriage even more. She believed her marriage would never have fallen apart if she hadn’t had to deal with the woman who bore Rolf’s sons.
Ruth told the investigators that she remembered more now about the arguments she and Rolf had just prior to his leaving. They had definitely been about Elinor.
“He wanted to give money to her,” she said indignantly. “Fifteen thousand dollars! He was putting pressure on me to let him give that woman fifteen thousand dollars of our money. It w
as my money, too.”
That had upset her terribly, Ruth said, because she was the one who brought most of the money into their bank accounts. She was the one with the business head who made investments, paid their bills, took care of everything so that Rolf didn’t have to worry about it. All he had to do was ask her for whatever cash he wanted. It was always there in the dresser drawer for him. But not to give to Elinor.
Tvrdy and Clever nodded sympathetically as she talked. After her first unexpected encounter with Clever, Ruth had regrouped and seemed quite confident that he believed what she said. She didn’t know that the investigators had made some inquiries at the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association, the organization Rolf had belonged to for years, where, as its oldest member, he was a popular “grand old man.” The pilots and their wives had had a number of parties since the prior August.
The last one had been in January. Of course, Rolf didn’t attend—but Ruth did. And she had quite a bit to drink at the party. One couple there recalled that she’d made an odd remark. She’d said, “Rolf won’t be coming home again; Rolf’s in heaven.”
Tvrdy asked her about that now, and she shook her head dismissively. “No, no—that’s not what I said. I said, ‘Rolf would be in seventh heaven if only he could be here!’”
“What do you think Rolf is using for money?” the undersheriff asked her.
“He told me when he left that he’d be taken care of by the Ekeneses.”
Later, although Ruth seemed to have an answer for everything, she finally outright admitted to Tvrdy and Clever that she had lied to them about going to Norway in October. Yes, she had left the island two months after Rolf walked out on her, but she hadn’t flown to Norway. Instead, she had gone to Louisiana to visit her son and other relatives who lived there.
Now her story became really convoluted: She said she had been so mortified, knowing Rolf was with Elinor, that she hadn’t even told her good friends and relatives what the real story was. She told one Lopez Island friend that she was going to Norway, and another that she was going to Louisiana.
“You see, I read a letter that was addressed to Rolf, and sent to the Pilots’ Association,” she said sadly. “It was from Elinor. Rolf always told me that he didn’t want a divorce from me. But Elinor sued us for seventy-five thousand dollars to support her two sons. She was going to cause trouble for Rolf by telling that he lied about his age back in 1917 so he could get his first-mate papers. He said he was born in 1897, but he was really born in 1900.”
That was true enough, but the sheriff’s investigators didn’t realize at the time of this interview that this was a story very similar to what Ruth had told Rolf two decades before to keep him from leaving her. It had worked then, and now she used another version of it to bolster her story about his elopement at the age of eighty with Elinor.
“Just before Rolf left me, he told my brother Robert that Robert had to stay here with me,” she added, explaining that her brother had been visiting them in August. “He told my brother, ‘She’s going to need you,’ and I realized then that Rolf was going to be gone a long time.”
One thing that Sheriff Sheffer and his detectives knew about Ruth cast a shadow of doubt over her version of the end of her marriage: Just as Ray Clever had once told her, it had been easy to check on her travels the previous fall. Clever had simply contacted all the airlines that flew from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport to Norway. Ruth Neslund’s name didn’t appear on any of their passenger manifests on October 10 or any other date in October 1980. Before she ever admitted her lies to them, they knew the truth.
Even more interesting, they knew exactly where Elinor Ekenes was, and Rolf wasn’t with her. Elinor might have traveled to Norway, but she had gone with another man— her new husband. They learned that she and Rolf had remained friends through the years, but she was anything but a femme fatale who was trying to lure him away from his wife.
The investigators allowed Ruth to ramble on about her theories, knowing all the while that Rolf’s disappearance had nothing whatsoever to do with Elinor.
Six
Although he had emigrated to America, Rolf had kept in constant contact with his family in Norway. Working with Interpol in Oslo, Ray Clever learned that none of his siblings or other relatives had heard from him.
Even before they heard from his friend Gunnar Olsborg, Rolf Neslund’s brothers and sister had become very concerned. Harald Naeslund, from the city of Drummond, and Eugenie Naeslund Lindboe, who lived in Oslo (both used the Norwegian spelling for their last name), had always been in close touch with Rolf, and the family not only had rituals they observed on special days, but they had planned to visit Ruth and Rolf in October 1980.
Naeslund was a well-known name in Norway, particularly in the shipping industry. Rolf’s siblings were quite wealthy now and owned a shipping line in their native country. They could well afford to visit him and Ruth in America, and he looked forward to having them in his home.
But Eugenie had received a strange phone call in October 1980, from Lopez Island, from Ruth—not Rolf. “I was missing Rolf,” Eugenie said, “and we talked about him. She said he was gone, and she didn’t know where. Ruth and I said we would call each other if we saw him. She said she wanted to come to Norway and talk to me. She said she would come in a fortnight. She never called me again.”
Eugenie recalled that Ruth said later in that phone call that she thought that Rolf had gone to “the Greek islands.”
Harald and his wife had been planning to visit Rolf and Ruth that October so they could celebrate a number of family birthdays together. Harald had been relieved that Rolf seemed truly serene in his retirement and not especially distressed about the bridge incident. In fact, he’d written to Harald in June 1980.
“I am very satisfied,” Rolf wrote. “I don’t need to go out anymore to sea. There is too much to do from early in the morning. The swimming pool will be ready when you arrive—hurry up and come.”
And again, on August 4, just a week or so before Rolf disappeared, he had written his brother enthusiastically, “We are waiting for the day you come!”
And then there was nothing. No communication at all from Rolf to his beloved siblings. Such a thing had never happened before, and they wondered if they might have offended him in some way. They didn’t want to go to America if they weren’t welcome, but there were no more calls about their planned trip in October.
Finally, on September 10, Ruth called Harald. “She told me that there was no need for us to come to visit,” he said. “She said, ‘Rolf’s not here.’ She said he drew twenty-five thousand dollars from the bank and was going to Europe. We canceled our plans to come to Lopez.”
On November 3, 1980, Rolf Neslund’s true birthday, his sister Eugenie had phoned the Neslund house to wish him a happy eightieth birthday. But he wasn’t there—and neither was Ruth. A stranger to Eugenie answered the phone to say Rolf wasn’t there, and Ruth had gone to visit her relatives. Although Eugenie didn’t know her, the house-sitter was Winnie Kay Stafford, one of Ruth’s closest and most devoted friends. She and her daughter had agreed to watch over the Alec Bay Road home while Ruth was gone back East.
Winnie Kay and her daughter moved into Ruth’s house when “they”—allegedly Ruth and Rolf—“went to Massachusetts” and she stayed for two weeks. Winnie Kay didn’t actually see Rolf leave, although, when she spoke about the Neslunds’ East Coast trip, she always said “they” and “them” in referring to Ruth’s travels that fall. When the deputies questioned her later, Winnie Kay said she had received many phone calls while she was staying at Ruth’s, and she had advised callers that Ruth and Rolf were en route to Massachusetts. Winnie Kay asked Ray Clever “not to bother” Ruth with questions because it would be “a waste of time.”
Harald and Eugenie were troubled. If Rolf had left on a trip to Europe or just to Massachusetts, surely he would have contacted them, and he almost certainly would have told them about his trips before he even left home. Now even Ruth w
as completely out of touch with them, and some stranger was living in their home.
Almost four months later, when he checked with the Norwegian Consulate, Ray Clever learned that if Rolf was in Norway in the late summer and fall of 1980, he could only have stayed for ninety days. After that, as an American citizen, he would have been required to ask for an extension of his visitor’s visa. But there was no record of that at the consulate.
Gunnar Olsborg placed ads in Washington State newspapers offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for any information on Rolf Neslund, to no avail. Apparently, no one had seen him, and there were no takers even for a hefty reward.
As the holiday season approached in 1980, Ruth had received sympathetic messages from her relatives and friends who were worried about her because her husband had, according to her, abandoned her.
“Dear Ruth,” two old friends wrote, “all of us down here were stricken by the news of Rolf. Buddy told us.
“It must have been so hard on you. You’re a strong lady, but there are limits. Hang in there, girl. We pray for you.”
And so, as the spring of 1981 approached, Rolf Neslund remained among the missing. Ruth told the sheriff’s men how she had found his beloved Lincoln Continental on the other side of the Anacortes ferry run, apparently abandoned there. Had he driven it onto the ferry and then down the ramp to the mainland himself, or had someone else left it there? If Rolf had left his favorite car behind, how did he get to Seattle or the airport or anywhere else, for that matter?
People on Lopez Island were used to Rolf Neslund’s being gone for weeks at a time, but that was before he retired after the West Seattle Bridge incident. Now he was retired and no longer had a job that would take him out to sea or on Puget Sound, steering ships into port.