by Ann Rule
No one who lived in the San Juan Islands in the 1980s has forgotten the Neslund case. Evidence from the trial is on display at the Historical Society in Friday Harbor— even including the bath mat near the tub where Rolf was allegedly dissected.
On a Saturday night in October 2003, seventeen years after Ruth was convicted, many of those involved in the trial had a reunion. The “State of Washington v. Nettie Ruth Neslund—Revisited” function was held in the San Juan Island Courthouse, with a reception following at the San Juan Historical Museum, where attendees could view the “Law and Disorder” exhibit there.
Since island dwellers who were interested were also invited, more than a hundred people showed up. The panel discussion in the courthouse included attorneys, deputy sheriffs, and jurors who were involved in the investigation and trial of Ruth Neslund. The original twelve-member jury had shrunk in the interim. Four of them had died and one had moved far away to Georgia.
Many of the half dozen jurors who attended had lingering questions about some of the facts of the case that had not come out in court. Charlie Silverman led them through the Neslund case once more, this time more able to answer their questions than he had been during the weeks of trial. They had never known much about Ruth’s background before she came to Lopez. And that was as it should be in a murder trial.
Ray Clever repeated his opinion that “Ruth was without a doubt the most evil ‘bad guy’ I’ve ever dealt with in my thirty-five-year career. They were nasty people—we called Ruth’s brother Bob ‘Butcher Bob.’”
Clever spoke of the forensic techniques that revealed the many bloodstains in the Neslunds’ home, and Juror Dick Saler told the rapt audience, “The forensic stuff was so critical.”
Clever explained to the crowd how close Ruth and her brother had come to being caught twenty-three years earlier. The investigator had eventually learned that Bob Myers had passed sections of Rolf Neslund’s body out the bathroom window, and used nearly a cord of wood to fuel the fire in the burn barrel as he cremated his brother-in-law. Then the burn barrel was loaded into Bob Myers’s pickup truck to be disposed of. However, as Bob was pulling out of the Neslund driveway, a sheriff’s car drove past.
“This scared him,” Clever said, “so he took the burn barrel up into the woods and buried it. We never did find it.”
Those who were brave enough studied the trial artifacts on display at the Historical Society, including the wheelbarrow used to carry Captain Rolf’s remains to the burn barrel. There were still faint bloodstains on the rim, as there were on the bathroom carpet.
For those attending and for most jurors, it seemed as if Nettie Ruth Neslund’s trial had ended only a year or two before. “It will stay with us forever,” Lisa Boyd commented.
Lisa had been called again for jury duty in 2001. Charlie Silverman was, once more, the prosecutor—this time in a child molestation case. Lisa became the jury foreman, the others deferring to her experience gleaned from Ruth Neslund’s trial.
And, as he has done so many times since then, Silver-man elicited a guilty verdict from the 2001 jury.
It (Ain’t) Hard Out There for the Pimps
When I watched the Oscar awards in the spring of 2006, the “best song award” went to a group of rappers whose sentiments I found totally wrong. The winning song? “It’s Hard Out There for the Pimps.” The audience of stars and Hollywood A-List people clapped and cheered when the winners were announced, but I wondered what we had all come to. While I admired the group’s enthusiasm and joy at receiving an Oscar, I wondered if they had any idea what they were really extolling.
A day or two before the Oscar ceremony, I watched an Oprah show in which she featured the star of a nominated movie—Hustle and Flow—in which the “pimp song” was featured. He told Oprah that he had done extensive research for his role by interviewing a number of pimps. “I found them rather sweet,” he said. And Oprah, despite being a long-time supporter of underdogs and hapless women, nodded approvingly.
I could not believe my ears! The song’s lyrics say that pimps have no other choice but to practice their trade, but I don’t buy it. After writing about naive teenagers and desperate grown women whose safety, dignity, and hope have been sacrificed to men who treat them badly, I readily admit that I’m prejudiced against pimps. When I talk to working girls—a euphemism for prostitutes—they confide that they never set out to walk the streets. They listened to heady promises from seductive men about how great their lives would be, and most of them have been reduced to taking terrible chances night after night just to make enough money to pay for a cheap motel, a “Cup-of-Soup,” or a McDonald’s hamburger for supper. That is about the only thing they do for themselves. Almost everything they earn by having sex for money goes to support the men who once claimed to love them.
I won’t equivocate: I don’t like pimps. They sit in cocktail lounges, wearing expensive leather jackets, big-brimmed hats, flashy clothes, and “bling,” while their stables of young women stand out in the rain trying to make enough money to please them, or at least to avoid making them angry.
Most pimps attract women by picking vulnerable victims and, initially, making them feel important and cherished. Sadly, by the time the women realize that the pimps don’t love at all, it’s often too late for them to escape. They have become mere chattel and they have no money of their own. They are trapped in a nightmare existence.
After writing Green River, Running Red, my opinion of the men who put their women out on the infinitely dangerous highways around Seattle dropped even lower. Many of them faked grief and remorse for the dozens of young women lost to a vicious serial killer, but I didn’t believe them. Too often, they seemed to revel in the media spotlight, basking in the attention shown them by reporters as they mimicked concern. Soon, they all had fresh recruits working for them.
I happened to be writing the case that follows at the time I watched the 2006 Oscars. It seemed fitting that I should speak up for the girls of the street that I’ve met, and the hundreds I’ve never known beyond seeing their sad photographs in the newspaper or on television beneath captions that read “Prostitute Murder Goes Unsolved,” or something bleakly similar.
So, I say, “No, it’s not hard out there for the pimps. It’s hard out there on the girls who work for them.” In the following cases, the tables were sometimes turned, with the weak striking back at those in power. I don’t believe that murder is ever justified—except in cases of self-defense or in the defense of others who are unable to protect themselves. But this next case may well have been terrifying enough to make the desperate women in Seattle justified in striking back—before they, too, became targets of a brutal sexual criminal.
It was the first day of June. After a long, long winter, it should have been sunny, but the day dawned bleak and cloudy that year with the threat of a storm. The weather was the least concern of the terribly injured girl who crawled slowly from her concrete prison in the basement of a condemned building on Melrose Avenue in Seattle. Something was awfully wrong with her—something she couldn’t quite focus on—and billows of what seemed like dark smoke kept blotting out her vision as she inched her way up worn steps. The sidewalk wasn’t far, but it seemed a football field away to her. She didn’t realize that she was completely naked; what reasoning power remained in her pain-befogged brain told her that she had to get someone to help her.
When she struggled to get to her feet, she fell—she didn’t know how many times. Finally she gave up and scrambled crablike on her hands and knees, moving forward only by inches through the overgrown shrubbery that blocked the dirt path from the busy street beyond. She was headed for The Melrose, a once-grand apartment built in the 1920s. Surely, once she got to the street, someone would see her and call an ambulance.
Through sheer force of will, the girl made it to the sidewalk. Through her blurry eyes, she could make out the form of a well-dressed, middle-aged woman approaching.
“Please...” she begged. “I’ve been h
urt. Please help me—”
The woman glanced at her with a combination of distaste and suspicion, and edged away. And then, incredibly, the woman quickened her pace and walked off without looking back.
The teenager crawled over to the grass-level basement window of the apartment building and rapped frantically on the window. But no one came. She began to black out once more and waves of nausea washed over her before she passed out again. When she came to, she was lying on the hard sidewalk. Then she saw a male passerby.
“Help me,” she pleaded. “Please help me.”
The man, too, ignored her.
She began to wonder if she was invisible and realized that she was probably going to die. Nobody could hurt this bad and live; perhaps she was already dead—that would explain why no one was listening to her. But then she saw another man move cautiously toward her. He stood there, watching her. Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe he could see her, after all.
“Please,” she whispered again. “I need an ambulance.”
She struggled to her feet, only to collapse again.
“You don’t have to come close,” she gasped. “You don’t even have to listen to me. I’ve been beaten up and raped. Just call me an ambulance.”
The man walked close enough to note the address of the apartment house, and muttered, “Okay.” But then he walked away. She prayed that he was going to a phone booth to call for someone to help her. After what seemed like a long time, she heard the wails of an ambulance approaching, and she allowed herself to sink back into the blackness again, barely aware of the paramedics from the Seattle Fire Department who were working over her.
If you could say that she was at all lucky, she was fortunate to have those highly trained paramedics trying to save her. Dr. Michael Copass’s innovative paramedic program was the gold standard in the nation. This team—Aid Unit 25—was stationed nearby at the Harborview Medical Center, where personnel were fully capable of dealing with everything from heart attacks to gunshot wounds.
Medic One paramedics were used to seeing the results of violent accidents and assaults, but this young woman’s broken body was as horrific as anything they’d ever encountered. It looked as if someone had used her for a punching- and kicking-bag. Her slender form was a mass of purplish bruises, her left breast completely discolored. She might have been pretty once, but they certainly couldn’t tell that now. Her eyes were almost swollen shut, blackened by the force of blows. Her broken jaw wobbled and her cheeks were caved in. Blood leaked from her nose and mouth, and each breath was agonizing.
Although they doubted that she would survive, the paramedics started an intravenous drip with D5W (a dextrose-saline solution to keep her veins open) to stabilize her. They managed to get an airway tube down her throat so they could administer oxygen. Now, they gently lifted her to a gurney and raced to the ER Trauma Unit of Harborview, less than a mile away.
She had no purse, no identifying papers. Nothing. They didn’t know who she was, and she couldn’t tell them; she might never be able to tell them. For the moment, she was a “Jane Doe,” admitted into the ER in extremely critical condition.
Seattle Police Patrol Officers H. J. Burke and R. S. Zuray had arrived at the Melrose apartment building within moments of the paramedics, and Burke had ridden along in the ambulance to the hospital with the victim to write down anything she said. It would be Res Gestae (spontaneous utterances), a virtual deathbed statement that would be admissible in court if she didn’t make it. Burke also photographed her in the emergency room, feeling privately that they were already working on a homicide case, even though the victim was still, technically, alive.
Zuray, along with Officer Dave Malland, remained at the scene, trying to locate just where the attack might have taken place, while their sergeant, Beryl Thompson, radioed in that detectives were needed at the 1520 Melrose address. Before her transfer to Patrol as a sergeant, Thompson worked as a sexual assault detective for years, and she was particularly adept at preserving evidence of rape.
Detective Sergeant Don Cameron and Detectives Duane Homan, Gary Fowler, and Ted Fonis responded at once from the Homicide Unit on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building. They sprinted to their cars and headed up the hill to the scene. Ironically, the victim had been found less than a mile from the Seattle Police Department’s main precinct. By the time they arrived, the street in front of The Melrose was jammed with official vehicles.
The Melrose was a well-maintained relic of an earlier day, having long since ceased to be the fashionable address it once was when Seattle’s high-society members hosted parties there, dancing the Charleston and drinking bootleg liquor. Their sprawling apartments had been sectioned off into smaller units for those who lived in genteel poverty, mostly elderly people living alone. They cooked on hot plates and watched a changing world through rain-spattered windows with faded curtains. Some of the occupants were younger, working for minimum wage, or getting money wherever they could. When they were drunk or drugged, or involved in “domestics”—fights between husbands, wives, and live-in partners—cops arrived, banging on doors. Every car in the Central District knew The Melrose well. There was no longer anything grand or upscale about the old apartment house.
Next door to The Melrose, overgrown rhododendrons, camellias, lilacs, and laurel hedges were slowly being choked out by ubiquitous Himalayan Blackberry brambles. The thick growth almost obliterated a walkway leading to a deserted old mansion whose windows were boarded over. Just beyond that, there was a car rental agency. The area afforded tenants an easy walk to the downtown district to the west, or, going south, to the hospitals located on Seattle’s “Pill Hill.” It was the kind of neighborhood where residents try not to get involved in their neighbors’ affairs, where fights and screams in the night often go unheeded because people are reluctant to face reprisal for calling the cops.
Zuray and Malland had looked around the area before the homicide men arrived and felt that the actual crime scene was probably at the abandoned house at 1516 Mel-rose. They pointed out what they had found to the homicide crew.
Jagged shrubbery was broken down along the walk leading back twenty-five paces from the street. Worn marble steps led down into the basement of the house. Nearby, a pair of tan knee-length nylons lay twisted on the walk. There were scuff marks on the sidewalk three feet from those steps as if a mighty struggle had taken place there.
The basement door appeared to have been forced open, and women’s clothing had been thrown into the stairwell leading to the cellar.
“We found the coat over here,” Malland said, pointing to a white leather coat with a fake-fur collar. “And blue slacks with blood on them. There’s a bottle of Tylenol pills, too. None of it looks like it’s been here long.”
Two rusty nails that extended from the basement window casing had strands of long chestnut brown hair caught on them. It appeared that the victim had been dragged forcibly to the cellar entry, her clothing ripped off as she went.
The detectives moved into the concrete room at the bottom of the steps. Even though it was full morning light outside, the room was shadowy and dark; as a prison for a helpless girl, it would have been just what her attacker wanted to drown out her cries. Now it looked like something out of a horror movie, with fresh blood splashed on the walls and rubble-strewn floor.
A pair of black high-heeled sandals, a bra, and a T-shirt—all bloodied—were on the floor. Crimson-stained panties rested next to a bundle of kindling.
The detectives knelt to look at a length of yellow rope, which had been tied into a loop.
“She had rope burns around her neck,” Malland commented. “It looked like someone dragged her by the neck.”
Blood and hair marked all four walls of the tiny basement prison. The victim’s attacker had literally bounced her off the walls in the savage attack. The picture in the probers’ minds wasn’t pretty: The girl had apparently been dragged from the street like an animal, with the rope around her neck, forced into th
is deserted room, stripped naked, and come very close to death. That she was alive at all seemed incredible, given the amount of blood that glistened on the floor and walls.
The only thing that the sadist had left of himself was the rope—and possibly an empty pack of Salem cigarettes that might have been his on the floor. Oddly, the detectives found two one-dollar bills wedged into a pipe that ran beneath the smudged window on the south wall.
Beryl Thompson approached the detectives with information she’d received from Officer Burke and the paramedics. “We’ve got a tentative ID on the victim and a very sketchy rundown on what happened to her. Her name is Arden Lee, and she has a home address in West Seattle. She can’t talk very well because her jaw is broken and her tongue is swollen, but Burke was able to find out that she came here with an Indian male—longish black hair, upper teeth missing—whom she knew as ‘George.’ She said that he beat and raped her.”
There were probably five hundred Indian males in Seattle who would fit the description, but it was a start. Detective Pat Lamphere, of the Sexual Assault Unit, left the crime scene and went to Harborview to see if she could find out anything more about the suspect from the victim.
A police radio operator reported that they had had two calls from the area during the night. Nearby residents reported hearing a woman scream. “We sent a car at about 11:45 and again at 2:20 A.M.,” the dispatcher said. “The officers checked the whole area, but they couldn’t find anything, and there was no screaming by the time they got there.”
Apparently, the victim had lapsed into unconsciousness in the dark corner of the basement both times the patrol officers were checking, and in the dead of night it would have been almost impossible for them to locate her.
Pat Lamphere and a social worker from the hospital attempted to question the victim, but it was very difficult. She was almost comatose and couldn’t talk to them with much lucidity. She did, however, respond to the name “Arden,” and she nodded when they asked if that was her name.
