No Regrets

by Ann Rule

  “No.”

  Although Butch Daniels would not budge in his testimony, Judge Bibb later ruled that the gun receipt would be excluded from consideration by the jury.

  The final witness for the defense was called on Wednesday, December 11. Fred Weedon called the defense’s own criminalist, a “freelance” forensic scientist, Raymond Davis. Davis said he disagreed with the Washington State Patrol’s crime lab experts, and with Rod Englert. In his opinion, the splatters of blood drops on the ceilings of the Alec Bay home had not come from a gunshot. He told the jurors that the blood mist was “also consistent with medium-velocity cast-off blood,” saying it could have come from an instrument or weapon that administered a blow. (Blood-spatter experts agree that it is very unlikely to mix up such diverse blood patterns.)

  Davis said he had inspected the bathtub in Ruth’s bedroom, but had not noted any chipping, gouges, dents, or defects at all. He testified that he would expect a broad-axe to have left such marks.

  As a professed expert in the burning of bodies, Davis insisted it was not possible to reduce human body parts to ashes in an open burn barrel. “Large and long bones, perhaps flesh, would remain.”

  He was not correct with that information. After two hours of intense heat, almost any human body will be reduced to only ashes.

  It was the predictable “war of the experts.” Who knew how the jurors would weigh what Davis had deduced against Englert’s more professional presentation?

  Ruth had her two close women friends on Lopez Island: fish-buyer Wanda Post and Ruth’s neighbor, Winnie Kay Stafford. Wanda had testified that Ruth had never spoken to her about her husband’s desertion or said anything about killing Rolf or disposing of his body.

  “Isn’t it correct,” Greg Canova asked, “that she didn’t have to tell you why Rolf left because she told you she’d killed him?”

  “No, that is not correct.”

  “Remember,” he warned, “you are under oath.”

  “I know that.”

  Wanda Post would not be shaken from her conviction, even though Paul Myers had testified that he had heard Ruth bragging to both Wanda and Winnie Kay over cocktails about how she had literally destroyed her husband.

  The other witness who could be extremely helpful to the prosecution was missing. Winnie Kay Stafford was deathly afraid of testifying. Winnie Kay had once been utterly devoted to Ruth Neslund, and Paul said she, too, had been privy to many clouded secrets, but she didn’t want to talk about them.

  Winnie Kay had told other island residents that she was afraid of Ruth, so fearful that she had moved. Packing up her life and leaving the Alec Bay Road neighborhood wasn’t very effective, however. Winnie Kay had first moved from the south end of Lopez Island to get away from Ruth, but her relocation was laughable; she only went as far as the middle of the tiny island, merely a hop, skip, and jump away from the Alec Bay Inn. Further, at any given time, Winnie Kay’s location was easy to determine. She was a well-known island personage who showed up at almost all public functions on Lopez, and attended every party. She had once been a stunning woman, and now—in her midforties—she was still very attractive, slender, with long brown hair that she wore either up in a bouffant style or cascading down her back. Author John Saul’s parents had known Winnie Kay for years, and the thriller writer often encountered her at parties. But now, suddenly no one saw her.

  There was a rumor that someone in Ruth’s camp had warned Winnie Kay that she would be better off far away from Friday Harbor, and that testifying against Ruth would be “unfortunate” for her.

  For whatever reason, Winnie Kay Stafford had driven south with a woman friend, headed for California. She had detoured into Arizona to drop her friend off, and now was reportedly “hiding out” in San Diego, California, with family members. Winnie had been full of anxiety about testifying. She was caught between her fear of Ruth and her concern that she might be prosecuted for being an accessory after the fact in Rolf’s demise, or, at the very least, for perjury.

  Winnie Kay had lied to a judge before to save Ruth, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near Ruth’s murder trial. She was afraid she might go to jail.

  Twenty-two

  Despite the intense interest in Ruth Neslund’s trial, life went on as it always had on the San Juan Islands. Residents crowded the ferries to do holiday shopping in Anacortes, Bellingham, and Seattle. Christmas lights appeared on the village streets and in the windows of homes, incongruous colored beacons, holiday counterpoints to the grisly testimony about blood, burning bodies, betrayal, and infidelity. As serious as the trial was, there was an almost “soap opera” feeling to it, as if it was still difficult to view as something that had actually happened to fellow island dwellers. Both Fred Weedon and Greg Canova were dynamic and attractive men—just like the lawyers on All My Children and The Young and the Restless. And while no one could describe Ruth Neslund as a glamorous woman, she did have a gift for the dramatic, an actress playing a powerful older woman who steadfastly denied any culpability in an alleged murder, seeming to be almost someone following a script.

  But as each new spate of long-hidden information morphed from rumor to admission, whispers became shouts. What was happening was not only real—it was moving faster than any television soap. Celebrities like Robert Goulet had been mentioned and scores of people the locals knew—their own neighbors—were achieving a kind of overnight fame themselves as they testified. The nightly news on the ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates in Washington State featured the Neslund trial at the top of the news. This was arguably the biggest media event ever to happen in San Juan County.

  Christmas Eve was two weeks away. The trial was winding up when, right on cue, local papers headlined “Surprise Witness!” In real life, most trials hardly ever have such startling turns. It is the stuff of Perry Mason and Matlock.

  Some expected that it would be Robert Myers, Ruth’s alleged accomplice, who was coming to testify. But Robert was in a nursing home, long since lost to a mind full of clouds. He had been adjudged senile and unfit to be a credible witness.

  No—it was the elusive Winnie Kay Stafford who had been located, Winnie Kay who was still petrified about testifying to the dynamite information she had kept secret. In the end, prosecutors had little choice but to offer her a plea bargain that would grant her immunity from perjury charges regarding her testimony at the special inquiry hearing shortly after Rolf Neslund vanished. She accepted the offer, and now she was coming home to take the stand as a rebuttal witness for the state.

  Winnie Kay was, perhaps, the most nervous witness of all the frankly anxiety-ridden witnesses who had been heard from so far, and she had reason to be. She tried to avoid looking at her one-time best friend, averting her eyes from Ruth’s stare. In answer to Greg Canova’s questions, Winnie Kay admitted that she had gone to the Neslund home late on the night of August 8, 1980. Ruth had called and told her to come.

  “Why did she ask you to come over?”

  “I was her friend... Ruth told me she wanted me to come over. She said she needed me.”

  At the defense table, Ruth laughed derisively.

  “Winnie Stafford seemed believable to us,” juror Lisa Boyd said. “She was younger than Ruth was, kind of average-looking, and she didn’t have that ‘tough look’ that Ruth had. She looked like the woman next door.”

  As Canova questioned her, Winnie Kay’s story spilled out. She recalled being summoned to the Alec Bay home around ten o’clock on that August night. It was warm outside, and twilight was just fading to darkness as she arrived. “Ruth let me in and she said she had killed him,” Winnie Kay said, her burst of words shocking in the hushed courtroom. “She said she had shot him—shot Rolf.”

  But Winnie Stafford hadn’t mentioned any of this when she appeared before the special inquiry judge, Robert Pitt. Now her recall was very different.

  “Why did you lie?” Canova probed.

  “I felt what had been done had been done, and I was protecting Ruth.”


  Winnie Kay described a grotesque tableau where she and Ruth sat on bar stools, sipping cocktails. Robert Myers was in the house, too, and Winnie Kay said she had seen him occasionally come to the sliding door of the room that adjoined “the music room” where the women sat.

  “He smiled and looked in a few times,” she said. “She [Ruth] indicated to me that she didn’t want me to know any of the details,” Winnie Kay said, breaking into tears. “She said Bob was in the bathroom. She said Bob was cutting him—Rolf—cutting Rolf up . . .”

  Winnie Kay hadn’t particularly wanted to know the details either, but they were almost unavoidable. It took strong drinks to soften the electric edges of panic she felt. She knew that just down the hall, Ruth’s recently deceased husband was being disjointed prior to disposal. It was truly a psychedelic evening, a horror movie. She had told herself it could not be happening.

  Some days later she had talked to Wanda Post, discussing what Ruth and Robert had done. Wanda offered that Ruth had also told her about what had become of Rolf.

  “She [Wanda] had gotten Ruth intoxicated one night, and Ruth told her.”

  Winnie Kay testified that, sometime after August 8, Ruth had expanded upon her motivation for killing Rolf. Ruth told her she and Rolf had fought over money when he discovered that he had no access to any joint bank accounts. Ruth told Winnie Kay that she had to put their money into her accounts because she fully expected Rolf to take it all with him when he left for Norway with Elinor. She couldn’t let him leave her penniless after all her years of managing their money so carefully—not when he deserted her for another woman.

  When Winnie Kay Stafford’s long-awaited testimony was reported in news bulletins, John Saul added a caustic stanza to his endless limerick.

  When Winnie came down to the Inn

  Friend Ruth had committed a sin.

  Ruth then she did urge her

  Her honor to perjure,

  And offered Miz Stafford more gin!

  Called to testify again on rebuttal, Ruth strongly denied that she had ever said any of the things Winnie Kay testified to. It was all lies. Winnie Kay was making it all up.

  • • •

  The trial was virtually over, and it was time for final arguments. Between them, Greg Canova and Fred Weedon would speak for four and a half hours.

  Greg Canova went first. He knew that the concept of a murder without a body seemed strange to laymen, and he explained once again that it was not necessary to show photographs of Rolf Neslund’s corpse to prove that he was, indeed, deceased. “All that was left of him [that was found] was blood on the concrete, and parts of his blood on the ceiling and on the gun that was used to kill him. Ruth Neslund must be held accountable for killing Rolf Neslund.”

  The defense forensic expert had said that parts of Rolf might remain somewhere and suggested they hadn’t all burned to ashes. Canova reminded the jury that the state had never claimed that Neslund’s body parts had totally evaporated. What mattered was that they had never been found. The testimony from so many friends and relatives whom Ruth had confided in was far more compelling than finding the body parts. She had told numerous people how she got rid of Rolf’s remains. Ruth had been unable to contain herself, and admitted to bloody murder many times, giving macabre details, particularly when she had enough to drink to lower her guard and loosen her tongue.

  That the murder had occurred wasn’t surprising. Canova commented that it had only been a matter of time before Ruth and Rolf—one or the other—would kill. They were deadly adversaries with “incredible animosity bubbling to the surface all the time.” That had become the norm for them.

  “What happened on August 8, 1980, was that it all exploded.”

  Canova deemed the defense’s attempt to offer Ruth’s nosebleeds and minor accidents as excuses for blood remaining in the house unconvincing. “Isn’t it amazing how every aspect of this case that seems to have physical evidence happens to have been destroyed, or cleaned, or ‘can’t be traced’?”

  There were numerous discrepancies, Canova pointed out, in Ruth’s stories. For instance, Ruth had testified that she found Rolf’s Lincoln Continental on the Anacortes ferry dock “a week or two after” Rolf left her “on August 14.”

  But the bills from the classified ads and her own phone records showed that she advertised his beloved car for sale on August 13 and 14. “The reason the ad was running was because she had the car at home,” Canova said. “She knew exactly where it was. The car was never driven anywhere by Rolf after August 8.”

  Greg Canova found Ruth’s statements, testimony, and the ensuing contradictions those of a woman “who knew exactly what she was saying when she was trying to cover her tracks. She just tried too hard and she got caught at it.”

  Over all, there was “compelling” evidence that Ruth had shot and killed her husband on August 8, five years earlier, and then helped her brother chop up and burn his remains. “Taken together, all the physical evidence is overwhelming beyond a reasonable doubt that Rolf was killed and Ruth killed him.”

  Fred Weedon’s final arguments stressed that there was no reason to believe that Rolf Neslund was really dead. “Just because Rolf hasn’t been seen since 1980, that’s no reason to believe he’s dead,” Weedon said.

  Perhaps, Weedon suggested, he had decided to start life over somewhere far away from Lopez Island, or he might have killed himself in a state of depression. Weedon told the jurors that Ruth was not obligated to prove what had happened to Rolf. He had been depressed, and Weedon reminded them of the witnesses he had called to establish that.

  As for Paul Myers, Weedon denigrated his effectiveness as a witness. “He’s a self-confessed drunk,” Ruth’s attorney said, a man with a blurred memory and a fogged-over grasp of reality. And Winnie Stafford—why hadn’t she heard any sound in the house where Robert Myers was allegedly cutting up a body? “Imagine if you can, the sound of a broad-axe chopping up a body in a bathtub.”

  And why wasn’t the fiberglass tub scratched or dented from the axe? Weedon declared Paul’s testimony unbelievable.

  Her attorney stood close to Ruth, his hand protectively on her shoulder, as he once more acknowledged that she wasn’t any angel. Yes, she, too, had a problem with alcohol, and she and her husband had been dealing with a marriage in trouble. But it hadn’t always been like that. Once, they had been happy, and Ruth had been “a person who took care of his [Rolf’s] every whim, his every need.”

  Fred Weedon had spent years representing Ruth Neslund, his neighbor when he spent time at his family’s vacation home, a woman he seemed to sincerely believe to be innocent. He was emotional as he spoke of her travail, and the tears in his eyes appeared to be genuine.

  Ruth Neslund was not a client any defense attorney might long for, but Weedon had worked very hard to show the jurors the other side of this case. What a travesty, he suggested, it would be if she was found guilty while Rolf might turn up somewhere . . . someday. He painted her as a humble and pitiable figure. Her bowed head and her clasped hands did make her look somehow innocent.

  Ruth was only sixty-five, but she had aged a great deal in the prior five and a half years—either from stress or from alcohol. More likely a combination of both. She had dangerously high blood pressure, and she walked with a painful limp from her broken hip. But her life had been good recently. She loved her bed-and-breakfast, and her new life.

  Would she spend her last years in prison? Or would the jurors find that there was not enough evidence to convict her?

  On rebuttal, Greg Canova scoffed at the lack of marks on the Neslunds’ bathtub. “Bob Myers was not a strong man,” he said. “He wasn’t swinging from his heels when he wielded that broad-axe. Can you imagine how long it took Bob Myers to do this terribly, terribly, gruesome thing?”

  Up to this point, Washington State had never had a guilty verdict in a homicide trial where there was no body. There were many who believed it was impossible to convince any jury to rule for conv
iction in such a case.

  But it was almost time for these jurors to wrestle with the two views of Ruth Neslund that had been presented to them. No one in the gallery envied them that task.

  Now the fifteen jurors needed to be winnowed down to twelve. There had been no need to replace any juror during the long trial, no one got sick or had family emergencies, and all fifteen had listened to the testimony and remarks. Court clerk Mary Jean Cahail drew three names at random, and those people were dismissed.

  The dozen who remained left the courtroom and Judge Bibb spoke to the attorneys. “I don’t often compliment attorneys” he said, “because if you do it too often, I find it diminishes the effect. But I’m going to do it in this case.”

  He admitted that he had probably “snarled” at all four of them—Greg Canova, Charlie Silverman, Fred Weedon, and Ellsworth Connelly—at one time or another during the tense trial, but none of them “had lost their cool.” Bibb said they deserved to be commended for that.

  It was late. Just as the sun set far into the evening on the August night Rolf Neslund probably died, the reverse was true in winter. The sun disappears prematurely in the Northwest in mid-December, and it was pitch dark outside the courthouse on Wednesday night, December 11, when they finished final arguements.

  The jurors would not begin deliberating until the next morning. They would be sequestered during those deliberations. In a day, it would be Friday, the thirteenth, hardly a propitious date for someone hoping to be found innocent.

  Perhaps it would not take that long. Some said the jury would be back before noon on Thursday. A jury that returns rapidly usually means a guilty verdict. The longer they debate, the brighter things look for an acquittal. Ruth Neslund’s jurors had four choices to consider: innocent; guilty of first-degree (premeditated) murder; guilty of second-degree (not premeditated) murder; and guilty of first-degree manslaughter.