by Ann Rule
Even so, the meat-grinder version was the most steadfast of all the rumors circulating about the fate of Rolf Neslund.
Those who had enjoyed Ruth’s sausages in the past lost their appetites.
During the ten days of the 1982 search, life went on on Lopez Island, and Ruth was sometimes relegated to the back pages of the local paper. As the search continued at her house, the Journal ran another story with seemingly more interesting local news: The girls’ basketball team from Lopez High School was welcomed home by a huge crowd after being the first team from Lopez Island to have participated in the Washington State final play-offs. Even though they didn’t win, the teenagers had a police and fire department escort with sirens wide open.
There was also a long feature on a crackdown on Lopez Island dogs—warning their owners to keep a closer eye on them. There wasn’t a leash law yet, but there could be if the canines kept chasing livestock.
All the while—and for almost two weeks—investigators swarmed over the Neslund home while Ruth complained that she had to depend on the kindness of friends or stay at motels.
The April 1981 search of the Neslunds’ home and acreage had netted only that single bullet. Fortunately for the investigators the current search a year later was much more successful in terms of physical evidence. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the second processing of the property finally opened doors for further investigation.
The law enforcement officers moving in and out of Ruth’s house kept scrupulous logs, noting the time each one entered and left, and every scintilla of possible evidence that they had bagged and marked. As the detectives and criminalists moved through the house, it was silent except for their own breathing and subdued voices. Was Rolf Neslund’s ghost here? If something awful had happened in these rooms, any overt residue of violence had clearly been hidden—wiped up, cleaned up, covered over. To the casual eye, Ruth’s house was now in immaculate condition, spick and span enough to attract guests to a bed-and-breakfast.
The searchers had to keep reminding themselves to look beyond the obvious, to stare at the slightest stain on a wall, or a baseboard, or even on the ceiling. Did any furniture or wall or floor covering look newer than the rest of the house, new enough to have been purchased since August 1980?
Ruth Neslund apparently kept all manner of receipts, records, and contracts. Now, despite her indignation, those fell within the scope of the search warrant. Her life and her habits and interests were all there. Few people were as meticulous as she was.
Ray Clever filled numerous notebooks in his remarkably small, careful printing, listing what he had found, and made out receipts that would be given to Ruth Neslund to indicate possible evidence the deputies had removed. (In the end, there would be more than seven hundred items!)
Ruth Neslund’s banking and tax records were precise and organized. She had apparently saved every receipt, letter, card, and bill she ever received. The couple held mortgage contracts on a number of properties. Clever saw eight full-size, four-drawer filing cabinets in her office area, and every drawer was full to bursting.
“As it happened,” Clever says, “I had taken a speed-reading course. It’s both a blessing and a curse. If I’m reading a really good book, I’m sorry that I read at the rate of twelve hundred words a minute. But during that search warrant, it was a blessing. I read through everything Ruth Neslund had filed, and I took all documents that seemed to be relevant into evidence.”
Tediously, Ray Clever jotted down a long list of documents. They might prove to be totally useless in the probe, or there could be information in the stacks of files and notebooks that could either link Ruth to Rolf’s sudden vanishing or clear her of any culpability or motivation.
It was likely Rolf never sat on the couch that was currently in the living room; her records indicated that Ruth had purchased a new couch just two weeks after she said Rolf left her. Earlier photos of the Neslunds’ living room showed the old couch, and bills from Hanson’s furniture in Mt. Vernon, a town just east of the Anacortes ferry landing, were for the present couch and matching love seat, purchased on August 23, 1980.
Clever and Joe Caputo agreed that portions of the living room carpet looked newer than the rest of it, although the pattern was exactly the same. Ruth had gone to Willett’s Carpet in Anacortes on August 16, 1980, and bought eight square yards of carpeting and seam tape. That was only eight days after her husband disappeared. And then on March 23, 1981, after Clever and Greg Doss first questioned her in late February, Ruth had gone back to the same store to purchase still more new carpeting and tape. This carpeting, which Ray Clever saw in Willett’s style book, matched the present rug in the master bedroom.
It wasn’t as if she had completely redecorated her home. Instead, certain sections had been patched or replaced so that the rooms would look to the casual observer exactly as they were when Rolf was there. Ruth had often said in a sentimental tone that she “wanted to keep our home just the way it was, so he will see that when he comes back to me...”
The two investigators cut only that carpet that seemed to be recently installed.
Beneath the new carpet, the padding was stained deep, dark red.
Eleven
“Ruth’s bedroom was a small armory,” Joe Caputo said. “Loaded handguns and rifles up against the walls, under the beds, in closets, or in the drawers.”
The search warrant listed any weapons Ruth might possess. According to those who knew Ruth, she was quite familiar with guns. They had seen her take a bead on a deer from her front door, and she also shot at cats to scare them away from quail on her property. She could shoot rifles, shotguns, and handguns. Indeed, a search of the Neslunds’ master bedroom netted a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver in the bottom drawer of a dresser. They bagged it carefully so that it could be tested for back-spatter or other evidence that indicated it might have been used to shoot a living creature. Its barrel would also be compared to the lands and grooves on any bullet casings they might find.
“Ruth was a hell of a shot,” one neighbor had said, and no wonder.
Clever and Caputo found a Colt Python in a pouch, along with six rounds, and a Winchester .22 Magnum rifle with a scope, which had eleven live rounds in the chamber. There was also a Marlin with a scope and eight live rounds, an Ithaca 20-gauge shotgun, a 30-06 shotgun, and at least two dozen boxes of bullets, ranging from .22s to 30-06 for a shotgun.
There were numerous knives of every size and a “chopper,” as well as hatchets and hacksaws, machetes, axes— not what most people kept in their homes. But this was, of course, the home of people who lived in the country and who often did their own chores, who sometimes hunted. Still, what might seem expected in ordinary circumstances now took on a macabre feel. The large ornate steamer trunk had a gray hair caught in the hasp. What did that mean? Ruth’s hair was tinted a dark auburn; Rolf’s was straight and gray.
They found a homemade “voo-doo-type” doll with a nail driven through its chest. Odd...
Joe Caputo searched Rolf Neslund’s bedroom, but there was little to find. “It reminded me of my own grandfather’s bedroom,” Caputo said. “Very spare—with few items in it beyond his bed and dresser. It was like a simple hotel room.”
He took the wood-and-leather jewelry box with Rolf Neslund’s jewelry, including his favorite Viking ship cuff links, his broken wristwatch, and his “Medic Alert” tag. Rolf’s clothes still hung in the closet.
During one of the last days of the ten-day search, Ray Clever and Joe Caputo paused in their search to rest. It had become habit for them to keep their eyes focused on what might be in such plain sight that they had missed it. Now Joe lay on the carpet and gazed up at the ceiling. As he tipped his head back to stretch his aching neck, he caught his breath.
There was the faintest mist of something dark brown against the ceiling tiles.
The faint dots weren’t all over the ceiling; in fact, it looked as if most of the ceiling had been resurfaced with a textu
red paint product. But one section had been missed. It was stained with what looked like high-velocity blood spatter—the fine spray resulting from a gunshot wound.
“It was right over where Rolf’s Easy Boy chair was,” Joe recalled. “He always sat there. I can remember Ruth sitting on her bed and telling me about how Rolf had hit her, even though she never had a mark on her, and Rolf sitting in that chair with scratches and cuts all over his face.”
The two deputies grabbed a saw and carefully cut that section out to be tested in the State Patrol lab.
Now they looked down. There was a concrete floor slab in the shadowy area behind the couch. It was porous enough that it, too, had absorbed some darkish liquid. They discovered that another concrete slab leading to the master bedroom was also stained. Not only were both areas marked with some fluid deposited there, they tested positive for some strong chemical designed to clean concrete. The investigators located a product called “Crete-Nu” among Ruth’s cleaning products.
It hadn’t worked as well as the label promised it would.
They would have to take these large and unwieldy chunks of evidence away with them. “We tented off the area to keep concrete dust from floating around the living room,” Clever says, “trying to keep the rooms as clean as we could.”
“But it was like a dust storm in there,” Caputo put in.
Clever and Caputo took turns with a jackhammer until they were finally able to lift and remove a number of the concrete slabs for testing. Despite the Crete-Nu, the lab would be able to tell if the dark stains were blood, and, if so, if they were human blood.
“That’s the first time I ever had to use a jackhammer in a crime scene,” Clever says. “And we couldn’t use a wet saw to cut through the concrete because it might have diluted any blood there. There was so much concrete dust. We vacuumed several times, but Ruth Neslund was still furious afterward because of the dust.”
All of the blotches, drips, and sprays were subtle, nearly invisible to the naked eye, but they glowed when the searchers sprayed the area with Leucomalachite Green or Luminol. What looked at first glance like rust or grime showed up as blood left on the frame of the sliding glass doors of the tub in the master bathroom, and they found similar stains on the walls of both the master bedroom and bathroom. There was even a faint path of droplets between the master bedroom and a bathroom on the other end of the hallway. A large stain resembling the imprint of a hand appeared on a carpet pad in the living room along this path.
The handles of a wheelbarrow reacted to the chemical agents, too.
With further testing, all of the stains proved to be Type A human blood. In certain areas—like the concrete slabs—there was so much blood that the person who had bled there would have to have suffered a major wound, probably a fatal wound.
The two most common blood types are A Positive and O Positive. Ruth Neslund had A Positive blood, but no one knew what blood type Rolf had.
When the stains, spatters, and mist the detectives found proved to be human blood, the only further information criminalists could determine was the blood type. It was 1982. There wasn’t enough to test for enzymes that might isolate the blood by racial pattern. But it was A Positive. That could have come from Ruth’s veins sometime over the many years she had lived in the house.
They couldn’t be more specific; DNA would not come into play for another dozen years.
The deputies and criminalists were collecting so much possible evidence in their second search that they had to go back to the judge and ask for an extension of their search warrant, but, in the end, it was worth it. They had bagged and labeled hundreds of pieces of physical evidence from the tiniest of possible blood specks to those heavy chunks of concrete floor.
One of the last items they bagged into evidence was the Reader’s Digest edition of To Catch a Killer. It had never been moved from Ruth’s coffee table in the year between searches.
“This time we took it,” Joe Caputo said. “It seemed pertinent.”
It was March 12, 1982, before Ruth was allowed to return home. She confided to anyone who would listen that the damnable lawmen had almost destroyed her home, complaining that they had left her house in shambles, pawed through her papers, left their muddy footprints, dust, and dirt, without regard to her nostalgic feelings about the home she had shared with Rolf for so many years. She claimed that her front door was damaged, her septic field and lawn dug up, and her peace of mind erased.
Caputo was one of the searchers assigned to the septic tank—not the most palatable job. “It was pumped out and it was pretty clean, but we had to do a close inspection of the drain filter.”
The other job that nobody wanted was wading through the swimming pool that Rolf had been so proud of, that he’d been anxious to show off to his brother and sister when they came from Norway. “It had about six inches of duck crap and mud in it,” Caputo recalled. “And that all had to be sifted. Ruth said that Perry Mortensen shot holes in the pool to let it drain, but that was not a true story. Perry was a hilarious guy, but he did not shoot holes in that pool.”
Ruth, however, said she had been almost ready to open a lovely bed-and-breakfast so that she would have some way to support herself. Things were in wonderful shape, and now that was delayed for heaven knew how long. Ruth even told the Journal that she had found several uncapped liquor bottles and believed that the sheriff’s men had been drinking her liquor while they searched!
It was a ridiculous charge, but it appeared in print. Sheriff Sheffer defended his men. They had worked many hours of overtime, and were exhausted when they finally cleared the Neslund house. And, of course, they hadn’t touched Ruth Neslund’s liquor supply.
“The only thing we drank in there,” Clever remembered, “was some terrible grape pop that we brought in with us.”
Ruth no longer liked Joe Caputo. She told her attorneys to be sure and mention in her documents demanding compensation for the losses she had suffered from the search that she had been shocked to find that he had “snuck his wife in there—in my house and she stayed over! I was stunned.”
So was Caputo when he heard that rumor. “I didn’t have a wife,” he said. “I didn’t even have a girlfriend at the time. I don’t know why she said that.”
Sheffer told reporters that the biggest handicap they worked under was the time that had passed—at least a year and a half—since Rolf was last seen. Ruth certainly hadn’t reported him as a missing person; it had taken his fellow ship pilots to sound the first tentative alarm and that came six months after Rolf had gone missing. The first search had been so restrictive in scope that they had found only the .22 bullet casings in the burn barrel.
Following behind the backhoe, the four deputies had sifted through dirt on the chance that they would find bones. This had taken many hours, but they found only occasional animal bones.
Now Ray Clever set out to determine Rolf Neslund’s blood type. The old man hadn’t donated blood, one source that often worked in detectives’ inquiries. His siblings and sons were currently in another country, and while their blood types might help in determining Neslund’s type, it wasn’t a sure thing. It was a “catch 22” situation. They were trying to prove that Rolf was dead, but if he was alive, medical personnel had to protect patient personal information. They refused to release the information that Clever needed to show that Rolf was deceased. And he didn’t have enough probable cause to get a search warrant to allow that. Clever checked with almost every hospital in the Seattle area to see if any lab had a record of Rolf’s blood type.
“It got increasingly difficult to get any information,” he remembered. “But finally someone let me know that there was that information in their records, although they were not able to tell me the blood type. Still, just my knowing the answer was there proved to be enough to get a search warrant to find out the blood type.”
Rolf had had surgery in Northgate Hospital for prostate problems, a common ailment in men over sixty. And some of his prost
ate gland had been retained after his prostatectomy. But there could be a problem with that. The tissue had been preserved in formaldehyde which might have altered the blood chemistry, making it impossible to determine his blood type.
Bob Keppel started a search for a lab that might be able to isolate the blood type despite the presence of formaldehyde. He located a Dr. Reubenstone in Chicago who had had some luck doing that.
Clever held his breath. Luckily, they were able to determine Rolf Neslund’s blood type.
It was A Positive.
Other crime lab findings on the items and swabs removed from the Neslund home also revealed that the person who had shed so much blood there had Type A Positive blood.
The .38-caliber revolver in the dresser drawer of the master bedroom bore silent evidence. With the expansion of hot gases as a bullet is fired from the barrel of a gun held at close range, “back spatter”—blood from the target—is drawn back toward the gun, sometimes into the barrel, sometimes on the cylinder. That was the case with this gun, even though it had been wiped cleaned since it was last fired.
Michael Grubb, a Washington State Patrol criminalist, wrote in his reports that some of the blood spatter found “was from a gunshot wound to the uncovered and hairless area of a human body or an animal, shot from a distance of less than three feet.”
It would seem that charges would be forthcoming.
Twelve
If this had been fiction, deductive reasoning would have dictated that someone who was living in the Alec Bay Road house in early to mid-August, 1980, would surely be arrested at any moment.
But it didn’t happen. The Neslund investigation was an uphill battle for the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, Criminal Prosecutor Charles Silverman, and the attorney general’s team, Greg Canova and Bob Keppel.
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.