by Ann Rule
As suspicious as the deputies were—and they were— there was no solid evidence that Rolf had not left his home of his own accord. It would take a lot more than his “abandoned” wife’s ever-changing stories to bring charges against her.
The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office expanded their inquiries into Rolf Neslund’s life and habits. They talked to his neighbors and his many friends, especially the ship pilots who knew him so well. Every interview indicated that he was a man of precise habit, a man who was gregarious and who kept in close touch with both his relatives and his friends. Ray Clever doubted that such a man would have voluntarily walked away from his life six months earlier. It didn’t make sense.
Sheriff Ray Sheffer, Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy, Greg Doss, Ray Clever, Joe Caputo, and Perry Mortensen, along with other deputies brought into the search for Neslund, didn’t know what had happened to him, but they were determined to find the old ship’s pilot—alive ...or dead.
It would not be easy.
The investigators began to examine Rolf Neslund’s life as minutely as if they were looking through a microscope. Could they find some forewarning, signal, or hint about where he might be? If he was alive somewhere, surely he should have been in contact with someone. And if he was alive, was there some way to entice him to walk out of the shadows?
If he was dead, where were his remains? Perhaps hidden in the depths of the Strait of Juan de Fuca? There are so many stretches of open water around the San Juan Islands and Seattle, and there had been several instances where people had simply vanished from ferryboats wending their way between the mainland and the islands of Washington: suicides, accidents, deliberate disappearances...or, perhaps, murder. Under the darkness of night, all it would have taken was a leap over a ferry’s rail or a swift push from someone stronger and younger than Rolf Neslund was.
Maybe he was buried somewhere on Lopez Island. He wouldn’t be the first victim to be dispatched and then buried in a hidden—but shallow—grave. Most of western Washington is made up of anything but rich loam. Without heavy-duty equipment, a makeshift grave is of necessity a shallow grave; any shovel hits rocks just beneath the surface. As one forensic anthropologist testified in a murder trial, “All makeshift graves in Washington State are ‘shallow graves.’”
Joe Caputo spent a lot of time walking the fields around the Neslund property—both on- and off-duty. “I’d get permission from property owners to do my ‘walk-abouts’ scrutinizing the fields and brush. If Rolf was buried there, I didn’t want the site turning up years later.”
But Caputo didn’t come across a lonely grave. And unless a body is discovered, it is very difficult to prove unequivocally in a court of law that a human being is no longer living.
Laymen tend to believe that the term “corpus delicti” refers to the actual corpse of a homicide victim. In truth, corpus delicti is the body of the case—not the body of the victim. But if detectives and prosecutors can come up with enough circumstantial evidence to convince a “reasonable man (or woman)” that a murder had occurred, it isn’t technically necessary to show a jury or a judge photographs of a body, a crime scene, or an autopsy report.
If it looks like a rat, squeals like a rat, smells like a rat, acts like a rat, then it just might be a rat. That would be an example of circumstantial evidence and deductive reasoning. Still, in the early eighties there were very few cases in Washington State—if any—where murder convictions had resulted when no body was ever discovered.
The San Juan County investigators believed that Rolf Neslund had been dead for at least twenty months, but they had to find a way to prove that.
All of us who are still breathing can be tracked by paper trails—credit-card purchases, phone calls, tax filings, bank deposits or withdrawals, medical care sought, letters, sightings, or chance meetings. Rolf had a bank account in Norway where he kept the several thousand dollars left to him in his mother’s will. He had not withdrawn any of the money there, nor had he tried to access any of the bank accounts he shared with Ruth for substantial amounts of cash—not after August 8, 1980.
All the checks written were signed by Ruth.
There were endless paper trails for Ruth. She had continued her life without a ripple. On August 14, only days after Rolf left her, Ruth put an ad in the Friday Harbor Journal, paying $9.10 to offer several items for sale: “Commercial meat grinder $550.00. Antique sewing machine $50. Potbelly Stove, $100. Office furniture, sofa, and chair—$125. Record-A-Call $350, Steel desk, $100. AND 1968 Plymouth 9-Passenger Station Wagon—$500, 1964 Ford Fairlane 500—$450, 1955 Mustang Fastback, pony seats, $2,000.”
How odd that she put Rolf’s prize Mustang up for sale almost before the door slammed behind him. . . .
Ray Clever wondered what might have occurred during the first ten days of August 1980 that would have caused a major rift between Rolf and Ruth. They had battled with words, fingernails, household objects, and fists for years—but they continued to live together, however uneasy the détente.
Clever suspected that there had been some kind of a sea change that summer, something so cataclysmic that there was no going back. Several of Rolf’s longtime friends had visited at his home or run into him in June and July 1980. They recalled that he was happy—“bouncy” almost, one said. He was in such good physical condition that he seemed barely to have aged in the last few decades. His mind was described as “very sharp,” and he had the muscles of a much younger man.
And then Ray Clever met a woman who had information that helped him find a loose end in the tangled skein of conflicting stories. He pulled at it and began to unravel the case by talking to a colorful witness named Kay Scheffler, who lived in the north end of Seattle. Kay was an old and platonic friend of Rolf’s, a large, rumpled-looking woman who resembled Marie Dressler or Marjorie Main as they looked when they played “Tugboat Annie” and “Ma Kettle” in famous movies of the past.
Kay told Clever that Rolf had come down to Seattle on July 29, 1980. He told her that he needed some cash, and he hadn’t asked Ruth for any that day, so he had gone to one of their banks to cash a seventy-five-dollar check.
“They wouldn’t cash it for him,” Kay said. “They told him he had insufficient funds.”
Puzzled and sure that it had to be a mistake, Rolf had stopped in to see Kay Scheffler. She loaned him thirty dollars. And then Rolf asked her about the mortgage he and Ruth held on the house she had bought from them.
“He asked me when I would be paying it off,” Kay said. “And I told him, ‘Rolf, I paid that loan off in 1975—five years ago. I paid Ruth.’
“He was shocked.”
Rolf had told Kay Scheffler that Ruth said the loan to her hadn’t been paid off. He himself had no idea about how much money he had—Ruth was in charge of that. She was the one who collected his retirement pension, and any other money due them. She did all the banking.
“He said he gave Ruth power of attorney to do all that,” Kay told Ray Clever.
Rolf was suddenly concerned; he didn’t know where his money was, and it sure wasn’t in the bank where he had tried to cash a check. He thought he had close to eighty thousand dollars in that account. Now, at his age, even though he was healthy, he was facing his own mortality. “He said he wanted to change his will so that he could leave something to his sons,” Kay told Clever. “I told him I’d try to help him, and he said he would be back to see me on August 5.”
Rolf Neslund came to Kay Scheffler’s house again on the fifth, and he told her he had taken care of some of his problems. Without Ruth’s knowledge, he had secretly taken the power of attorney document out of their safe.
“He thought that’s all he had to do,” Kay said. “That, if he had the papers, Ruth couldn’t say what to do with his money. I told him that wasn’t enough—that he had to hire a lawyer to revoke her power of attorney.”
Rolf then asked Kay if she’d help him find an attorney and she said she would. He was also worried because he’d found out that Ruth ha
d applied for a mortgage loan on their Lopez home—which had been free and clear for years. But she hadn’t told him anything about that. Rolf wanted help getting the title so he could see what was going on. He told Kay he also intended to see that his pension payments from the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association came directly to him—and not to Ruth.
“I told him I’d help him,” Kay said, adding that Rolf had been agitated and that before he left, oddly, he actually said he was afraid of Ruth. They had made an appointment for him to come back on August 12, when Kay Scheffler would have the title report on his house for him.
“But he didn’t show up,” she added. “I haven’t seen him since.”
Once he’d been alerted to the problems with his bank accounts and the fact that Kay Scheffler had paid Ruth the last of the money on her mortgage five years earlier, Rolf visited or called several old friends. Among them were Margaret Ronning and her husband. The couple had also purchased real estate from Ruth and Rolf. He stopped at the Ronnings’ house on July 29, after he left Kay’s.
Rolf asked Margaret if they owed him or Ruth any money, and she shook her head. Like Kay, Margaret Ronning had paid off everything—to Ruth—a long time back. Rolf told Margaret, too, that he was trying to discover where all his money was, and that he’d just found out there was no money in his account in the bank he had always used.
Rolf went back to the Ronnings’ house on August 5, but they had other company and he didn’t stay. “He said he would come back another time,” Margaret said, “but we never spoke with him again.”
The old man had also gone to see Elinor Ekenes on those same two days—July 29 and August 5. His long-ago sweetheart saw that Rolf was very upset, and he told her he was determined to change his will. He wanted their sons to have a fair share of his assets, and he promised Elinor he would find a way to put that in his will.
“If I die,” he said bleakly, “please see that there is an autopsy on my body.”
Elinor had stared at him in surprise as he explained he was living in fear for his life. The slender woman told Ray Clever that it was his wife, Ruth, that Rolf was afraid of.
It was out of character for Rolf Neslund to be afraid of anybody or any thing, but Elinor said she felt he was truly fearful. She knew from her own experience that Ruth did strange and disturbing things.
“Sometime in the winter of 1979,” Elinor recalled, “she called our phone and asked to speak to my son, Erik. I told her that he wasn’t home, and she told me to give him a message.”
“What was that about?” Clever asked.
“She said, ‘Tell him his father is dead.’”
That, of course, turned out to be untrue, but it was the kind of statement that could stop a heart in midbeat.
Elinor told Clever that from the first month Rolf had married Ruth, he talked about leaving her. “The last time I saw him—on that Tuesday, August 5—I suggested that he should just go to Norway and not return—just stay there, because his life was so miserable. And he told me, ‘You have no idea how many times I’ve tried. They’ve always caught up with me.’”
“They?” Clever asked. “Who would that be?”
Elinor wasn’t sure, but she thought Rolf meant Ruth and some members of her family because she seemed to be in close touch with them, and often had her relatives staying with the Neslunds.
“That day,” she recalled saying to Rolf, “I told him I was going to Norway in a week. But we had no plan to go together.”
It was Elinor’s belief that Rolf feared Ruth was planning to poison him, and he was worried that, without an autopsy, she would probably get away with it.
There was no question that Rolf Neslund was nervous about what Ruth might do, but apparently he wasn’t convinced he had only a short time to live, because after he left Elinor, he had ordered his new glasses. He obviously expected to live to wear them. His optometrist’s receptionist told Clever that Rolf had never come to pick them up. She had sent several bills to his home on Lopez Island in the fall of 1980.
“Mrs. Neslund finally sent us a check in the first part of March—March 1981.”
Clever realized that would have been about two weeks after he and Greg Doss had called on Ruth and begun to ask questions.
Although Rolf had access to all that money in a retirement account, he hadn’t withdrawn any of it. However, his pension checks had been cashed, endorsed by Ruth. That was also true of his Social Security checks. That hadn’t raised any red flags because she routinely did all their banking.
Rolf Neslund himself had left no paper trail at all. He was in the midst of life in the second week of August 1980, and then he seemed to have walked into the mist that sometimes clings to the shoreline and country roads of the San Juan Islands at dusk.
No one had heard from him since August. For more than fifty years, he had personally written and addressed Christmas cards. The address list that had once numbered 150 had dwindled to only about twenty-five lifelong friends as he aged and his friends died off. Contacted by the investigators, not one of his close friends had heard from him during the Christmas holidays in 1980.
As Ray Clever and his fellow investigators continued to follow an ever-changing path to Rolf Neslund, they became more baffled. There were just too many stories. Now they learned that Ruth had told one of her neighbors that Rolf was in New England with some distant relative, and that she planned to go there and bring him home.
Naturally, the question arose: “If Rolf Neslund was alive, what was he living on?” He hadn’t accessed any of his usual sources for money. When she was asked about how much cash Rolf had taken with him, Ruth came up with varying amounts—from six hundred dollars to twenty-five thousand dollars.
It had been easy enough to find out where Rolf was during the first week of August 1980. But one day seemed to be the last day he was seen. He’d conveyed his concern and his outright fear of his wife to several friends, and then gone about his errands. On August 5, he ordered the new glasses, but he hadn’t picked them up. His personal physician had prescribed the drug Orinase (generic name: tolbutamide) to treat Rolf’s adult-onset Type 2 diabetes.
Ruth had apparently failed to understand his illness, or she was lying to the investigators. She was wrong when she told them that alcohol “poisoned” Rolf’s blood. That was the opinion of someone with little medical knowledge; alcohol was not good for someone with diabetes, and it would certainly have aggravated Rolf’s condition and raised his blood sugar, but it didn’t “poison” him. Because he did drink, it was essential that he not run out of his Orinase prescription, and yet he had failed to pick up his medicine from the pharmacy, and he had never called his doctor for a renewal either.
Besides missing his appointment with Kay Scheffler, Rolf had also arranged to meet with one of Ruth’s nieces, Donna Smith, on August 12. He hadn’t shown up and that puzzled Donna.
The San Juan County sheriff’s investigators had now narrowed the dates of Rolf’s “leave-taking” to August 7 and 8. By the middle part of August, Rolf hadn’t shown up for any appointments he’d made.
When he left, he had no money, no car, no glasses, no medicine, no extra clothes, no lucky cuff links, no watch, none of the items he would need for a long journey.
But where on earth did he go? And how could he possibly mingle with other walk-ons onto a ferry headed off-island without someone recognizing him?
Seven
The search for Rolf Neslund was ultimately frustrating. Several weeks after their initial visits to Ruth Neslund in her Alec Bay Road home, the San Juan County sheriff’s investigators had little doubt that Rolf was dead, but they had not one iota of physical evidence that might prove that to a jury. Cases can go forward with a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, but they were pretty sure that no prosecuting attorney would want to take on the case as it was. It was all smoke and mirrors and theory, nothing to take to the San Juan County deputy prosecuting attorney on criminal cases, Charlie Silverman. If they did, he would surely
send them out to get more physical evidence.
Furthermore, it really didn’t seem likely that a woman of Ruth Neslund’s age, who was overweight and claiming to be in poor health, could have the strength to carry out a grisly murder. Still, when this information was lumped with all the other bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence the sheriff’s investigators had gathered, it was at least enough to allow the investigators to obtain a search warrant for the Neslund property.
They got their search warrant.
On April 13, 1981, Donald K. Phillips, a supervising criminalist from the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, traveled to Lopez Island. It was barely light when he boarded at Anacortes, and Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy met him on the ferry landing at seven-forty-five that morning.
It was going to be a beautiful spring morning. Trees and bushes were just leafing out with bright green new growth, fruit trees had blossoms, and daffodils, forsythia bushes, and Scotch broom dotted fields and yards with bursts of buttery yellow.
And so, eight weeks after Greg Doss and Ray Clever had first interviewed Ruth Neslund about her missing husband, a phalanx of official cars turned down the dirt lane that led to her backyard. Sheep nibbling in the pastures ignored the convoy.
Phillips, accompanied by Doss, Clever, and Caputo, was about to search for evidence that might prove that the old sea captain who had lived here had been dead for months—that he had never left home at all.
All of it seemed surreal.
The men located several green plastic garbage bins behind the red house. They were filled with burned and partially burned debris. When it was spread out on a screen and examined, they found a single spent .22-caliber cartridge and bagged and labeled it. The burned and partially burned material in the green garbage cans wasn’t unusual—only insulation, beer cans, blackened metal, glass jars, and some carpet.
Nearby, they saw that a blue metal burn barrel contained still-burning coals. Without garbage pickup on the island, everyone along the rural roads had burn barrels. This one was new, its paint barely singed, far too new to hold the remains of a man who had disappeared eight months before. Still it made the hairs on the back of their necks prickle to think that it was possible that Rolf Neslund had been disposed of in a similar barrel. But when they looked in, the glowing ashes looked to be only papers and normal garbage.