by Ann Rule
The searchers spread out over the yard and into the pastureland beyond, their eyes focused on the ground as they looked for some sign of what might have been a grave. They found no suspicious dips or humps.
Next, they moved into the residence and searched it meticulously. The search warrant had listed the specific evidence they were allowed to look for: bullet holes in the wall and/or bloodstains. Phillips tested a number of stains he found to see if they were blood. They weren’t.
At some point, Joe Caputo sat with Ruth in her living room. He noted a book on her coffee table, a Reader’s Digest condensed edition. He read the title to himself —To Catch a Killer: How to Get Away With Murder. Ruth saw him glance at it, but said nothing.
A Chevrolet station wagon parked outside was also tested for bloodstains. There were none.
The search team spent two days going over the Neslund property, but in the end there was nothing at all in the homey house that could be construed as physical evidence in a murder: only a single bullet cartridge. That didn’t mean much out in the country. Ruth herself was known to be skilled with guns, and those Lopez residents who lived in the country sometimes fired rounds at dogs to scare them away from stalking sheep.
Donald Phillips took sixteen photographs of the house which he had enlarged and later gave to Greg Doss.
One lawman who asked to be anonymous said, “We have a suspect, we have a motive, we don’t have a body, but we think there was one here once.”
Ruth Neslund was scornful and triumphant as she crowed to friends that the detectives hadn’t found anything. Why should they? She assured them that she would never have hurt Rolf.
She told several people that he was most likely “sitting in the Greek islands, waiting for all of this to blow over— and then he’ll come home.”
But the months passed and seasons changed, and Rolf didn’t come home.
Eight
The missing persons case, or, more likely, the possible homicide case, stalled.
Just as the deputies had suspected, Charlie Silverman was hesitant to bring charges against anyone without more proof or information. And for good reason. Should someone be charged with murder, tried, and acquitted, that would be the end of it. New evidence wouldn’t matter because double jeopardy would attach. No one can be tried for a crime again after he has been found not guilty. It was better to wait, but it was galling for the sheriff’s deputies who believed that Ruth Neslund knew exactly where her husband was.
Ruth’s supporters were steadfast, and they formed a circle of protection around her. She certainly wasn’t a pariah, and her life continued almost as usual. She was free to entertain her friends, to visit with them, to leave the island whenever she chose.
With the case becalmed, and the sheriff’s investigators backing off—or so Ruth thought—she went about her business. She had already sold Rolf’s Mustang a few months after he disappeared. In June, she placed an ad in a local paper, the Friday Harbor Record’s classifieds. She offered to sell her house and land, listing the property for half a million dollars. Even though she advertised it both locally and in the Wall Street Journal, at that price, she got no serious offers, only a few lookers. Eventually, she changed her mind, and took it off the market.
By December 1981, Rolf had been gone for sixteen months, and Ruth said she needed some kind of resolution about their finances. Wherever her husband was, she had to live, and to do that she needed some income she could count on. Back in the spring, the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association had moved to block her from getting Rolf’s eighteen-hundred-dollar-a-month pension payments. She had always resented the way Rolf handled that money because she knew he had given some of it to Elinor to help out his children.
“All he wanted,” Kay Scheffler said, “was six hundred dollars for the house, six hundred dollars for her [meaning Ruth], and six hundred dollars for himself. Ruth told me that she said to him, ‘I’m not going to give it to you; you’re just going to give it away!’
“He was figuring he’d give his share to his sons,” Kay continued. “She [Ruth] figured to hold on to it.”
In her petition to be appointed trustee of Rolf’s property, Ruth complained to San Juan County Superior Court Judge Howard Patrick that she was barely scraping by. She said her current income was only about five hundred dollars a month.
In a hearing held on December 16, Rolf and Elinor’s younger son, Erik Ekenes, twenty-one, requested that he or “some other suitable person” be appointed as the trustee—anyone but Ruth. But even Erik’s attorney acknowledged that civil law decreed that the preferred trustee of the estate of a missing or incompetent person is normally that person’s spouse. And that, of course, was Ruth.
Judge Patrick appointed Ruth trustee—but with several conditions. The Court ordered her to file an inventory and an appraisal of the property. That would be used to fix the amount of bond she would be required to post before her trusteeship became official.
Erik and Rolf Ekenes agreed not to interfere with Ruth’s activities in any way. They weren’t after their father’s estate, because they didn’t believe there was anything left of it. Surely, Ruth had either already spent the money or hidden it away. What they did want was some resolution and some kind of justice for their father.
On January 8, 1982, Ruth dutifully appeared before Judge Patrick with her handwritten inventory. More realistically, she now valued her home at $266,533.73, a little more than half her asking price six months earlier. The judge ordered that 70 percent of that figure would be her bond, and he also stipulated that she could pay herself considerably more than five hundred dollars a month from income accruing to the property.
For the moment at least, Ruth Neslund’s life took on a modicum of serenity. Rolf was still missing, but she had her home and enough to live on, and she continued to buy and sell antiques and other items ranging from furniture to small parcels of real estate.
But any exultation Ruth may have felt over her small win in Judge Patrick’s courtroom would not last long. Sheriff Sheffer’s department had no intention of dropping their investigation into what might have happened to Rolf Neslund.
They continued to receive hearsay and tall tales that were circulating around Lopez Island.
All of it led exactly nowhere.
• • •
And then, Ray Clever’s reporter brother, Dick, wrote a story about the disappearance of Rolf Neslund, and it appeared under a prominent headline. It was enough to spur two women to come forward—even though they were afraid of vengeance if someone should be angry with them.
They were Ruth’s nieces, who were concerned about the way their “Uncle Rolf” had disappeared. They weren’t sure what the true story behind that might be, but they were worried. And they wrote to the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association.
Ruth’s older sister, Mamie, had two daughters in their thirties: Joy Stroup, who lived in Circleville, Ohio, and Donna Smith, who lived in Washington. The information the women sent puzzled those who opened mail at the Pilots’ Association, but longtime pilots Captain Gunnar Olsborg and William Henshaw followed up on the information they had sent. Both of them, especially Gunnar Olsborg, remained among Rolf’s closest friends. They read what sounded like a fearsome story: Joy Stroup had made a bizarre and shocking accusation against Ruth.
Joy wrote that she wanted to talk to someone in authority about her aunt Ruth. Ruth had evidently called her many times between November 1979 and July 1980. Most of the time, she had been drinking and said crazy things like, “I’m watching Rolf out the window,” and, “I could shoot him from right here.” Sometimes she spoke of “wasting Rolf” or “burning him.”
Joy’s sister, Donna Smith, lived in the Seattle area. She was the girl who had been like a daughter to Ruth when she was younger, but Donna remembered the time Ruth had locked herself in the bunkhouse to keep Rolf away. Ruth had called her, saying, “If he comes back here, I’m going to shoot him!”
That was in the fall of 1979, and
Ruth had threatened violence toward her husband in numerous phone calls since. Indeed, there had been so many phone calls when Ruth was inebriated that her relatives tended to dismiss them as drunken ravings.
But Captain Gunnar Olsborg had a sinking feeling about Rolf. He suspected his longtime friend was dead, his body hidden from view.
San Juan County authorities made arrangements for Joy Stroup to fly to Seattle for a meeting. The Puget Sound Pilots’ Association paid for Joy’s trip. Joy Stroup, Donna Smith, Gunnar Olsborg, San Juan County’s Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Charlie Silverman, Ray Clever, and an attorney met in the Columbia Tower, a soaring building in downtown Seattle.
This was a clandestine meeting for many reasons. Joy and Donna were afraid of reprisal from their aunt and from other family members, and neither the San Juan County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office or the Sheriff’s Department were able to act on what they heard that day. If anything that the young women described had, indeed, occurred, it still had to be proven.
An investigation like this would be difficult for a big-city police department and prosecutor; it seemed almost impossible for a small county sheriff and a prosecutor who was far better versed in civil law than in criminal proceedings. Silverman, newly elected, admitted that he felt he was in over his head. Beyond that, San Juan County had few citizens per square mile and their tax base didn’t spew out wealth to pay public servants and court costs for massive investigations.
Fortunately, the legislature in Washington State voted in a new law in 1981, a statute that would be central to the Rolf Neslund investigation. The State Attorney General’s Office now had a Criminal Division: prosecutors and investigators who, along with the Washington State Patrol’s criminalists, were available to assist some of the state’s smaller and less-affluent counties when they were involved in major probes. Attorney General Ken Eikenberry was sending his top team in to work beside the San Juan County detectives.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Greg Canova and Criminal Investigator Bob Keppel (the same Keppel who was the first King County detective assigned to the Ted Bundy cases in 1974, and who would later advise the Green River serial murder task force) were young, but they were already two of the smartest and most admired men in Washington State criminal law. Together the AG’s team would soon successfully prosecute murderers years after the killers thought they had, quite literally, gotten away with murder. The Neslund case would be their first.
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?
Nine
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 th
e 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.)