Joy thought that her aunt had mentioned something about calling a “sheriff,” or that “the sheriff was coming,” but could not recall exactly what Ruth Neslund had said.
During the ensuing weekend, the witness said, she had tried to call Ruth again, but there was no answer. “I was hoping it would be like other instances, that it would be [the next] morning, and everything would be all right.”
It always had been in the past, no matter how angry her aunt was with her uncle. But there was only the shrilling of a ringing phone in an empty house, and that wasn’t reassuring.
On Monday, Joy Stroup had heard again from her aunt. “She told me Rolf was in Norway, and she had gone to Bellingham just to get away from there for the weekend.”
“Did you ask her again about what she had told you?”
“No. She never brought it up again, either—or denied it or took it back.”
On cross-examination, Joy Stroup acknowledged that there had been a period of estrangement in her relationship with both her “Aunt Nettie” and her sister Donna after a “little spat” after her father’s funeral in 1969. Actually they had not spoken for eight years.
Still, it did not diminish the impact of Joy’s testimony—or of Donna’s.
Robert Myers had not been charged with murder, nor was he called on to testify. He was lost in his own mind, unable to tell reality from nightmares.
But Paul Myers, seventy-two, was ready to take the stand. He was not any prosecutor’s ideal witness. Like his sister, Paul was a drinker, but he openly admitted it. He wanted very much to testify. Paul had been haunted by the story he heard from his sister and brother. He had confided to Ray Clever that he feared he might even be an accomplice to murder. He testified that he had been persuaded to haul a section of carpeting to the dump for Ruth. Later, she told him that there were bits of Rolf’s body rolled up in it.
Now he told the jury what he believed to be the scenario of Rolf Neslund’s last hour in his beloved home. He spoke of what Ruth and Bob had told him when he visited on Lopez Island.
“She [Ruth] told me she shot Rolf twice in the head and killed him.”
“Did you believe her?” Greg Canova asked.
“No, I’d heard so many stories I didn’t believe any of them.”
Ruth had given Paul most of her standard explanations for Rolf’s being gone. “She said he was in Norway. She told me he’d jumped off the ferry, [because he was] despondent over hitting the bridge with a ship. I knew that was false ’cause I knew Rolf.”
“Do you know why Rolf was shot?”
“My brother Robert told me it was about money,” Paul testified. Robert had explained that Rolf was angry when he found out that Ruth had transferred his pension and all his money into her bank accounts. “Rolf told Ruth to put the money back—‘or else!’ Robert said he got ‘or else.’”
Paul said he had overheard Ruth and Bob talking about what they had done. Apparently, Ruth had instructed Bob to hold Rolf while she went to her bedroom to retrieve her handgun. After she shot him, he had fallen backward over the couch.
Although he wasn’t at the Alec Bay house when Rolf was killed, Paul Myers said that he had been sitting at Ruth’s bar in the Neslunds’ sunroom on two occasions when Robert and Ruth were telling two of her women friends, Wanda Post and Winnie Kay Stafford, about what had happened to Rolf. He heard them clearly as they’d made no effort to talk quietly.
Ruth was not as composed during her brother’s testimony as she had been when her nieces spoke. From time to time, she shook her head firmly, and scribbled notes that she passed to Fred Weedon and Ellsworth Connelly.
Paul spoke like an automaton, showing virtually no emotion as he described a scene right out of hell.
“Bob and Ruth put Rolf on a sheet and dragged his body to Ruth’s bathroom. Bob put Rolf in the bathtub and cut him up with a butcher knife and a broad-axe—and possibly a saw. And when she brought those, he shut the door and pushed her out of there.
“He butchered Rolf’s body, cut it up in pieces and [Ruth and Bob] carried the pieces out to the back [behind the barn] in a wheelbarrow to a burning barrel. They burned the body parts with wood until there was nothing but ashes, and dumped the ashes in the cow manure.”
Ruth had been concerned that the burn barrel itself might contain some residue, so it was cut into quarters and, with the body of a still-born calf, taken to the dump.
At this point, Ruth had told Paul that he had become an accessory to murder.
And so, five years, three months, and sixteen days after Rolf Neslund completely vanished, the story that everyone in San Juan County had whispered and wondered about had come to a gruesome and ugly climax.
That is, if Paul Myers was to be believed.
Some of the jurors said later that they had not found Paul Myers credible. “I don’t know if he was drunk on the stand,” one woman said, “but he talked so much about the alcohol he had put away.”
On cross-examination, Fred Weedon had no trouble getting Paul to admit that he was drinking a half gallon of whiskey a day during his visits to Alec Bay.
“It sounds like you were drunk up here all the time?”
“Practically,” Paul agreed. “Seven to eleven in the morning was about the only time I wasn’t drunk.”
“Does alcohol affect your memory?”
“I believe it does—but I was so shocked at what I overheard that it’s indelibly marked in my memory.”
And Paul’s recital of Rolf Neslund’s death was almost identical to Joy Stroup’s.
It now became indelibly marked in the memory of all who heard it.
Nineteen
People in the San Juans could hardly be blamed for talking about what was happening in the courtroom as the testimony became more and more shocking. Early on, court administrators had realized that the ferry ride to Friday Harbor and back to the home islands of jurors could very well be fraught with problems. The jurors were relegated to a particular section of the ferry decks, marked by tape, where they could not overhear comments by other passengers. At times, they felt almost ostracized.
Since they were not segregated, jurors could go to lunch on their own, and they did, in pairs or small groups. Two female jurors were in a restaurant when they heard a county politician from across the room as he commented loudly about trial testimony.
“We walked over and introduced ourselves as jurors,” one of the women said, “and asked him to speak more softly. He was annoyed, but at least he lowered his voice so we couldn’t hear his opinions.”
Four weeks after Ruth’s trial began, the prosecution was winding down. Earlier, the jury had heard Ray Clever, Greg Doss, and Joe Caputo describe the long search of 1982. What they found meshed with Paul Myers’s statement about what he had overheard as he sipped whiskey in the Neslunds’ sunroom. There was no question that Clever, Caputo, Doss, and Mortensen had, indeed, located the physical evidence that supported Paul’s description of Rolf’s sudden death.
Thanksgiving—to be celebrated on November 28 in 1985—was drawing near as Donald Phillips testified to the dozens of stains in the Neslund house that had proved positive for blood. The concrete slab behind the couch had not only been scrubbed with Crete-Nu, an acid wash, but the defendant and her brother had apparently “ground” it down with a power tool in an effort to scrape off any remaining bloodstains. Much of the carpet had been replaced, and Ray Clever had the receipts and the salesmen’s statements about Ruth’s purchases of new carpeting.
Ruth had had a ready explanation for spiffing up her house so soon after Rolf’s unexplained departure. She told her brother Paul that she was laying new carpets in her home because Robert Goulet, the well-known singer, was interested in buying it, and would be coming by to tour it. That caused a ripple of interest in the gallery.
One of the most effective witnesses on the bloody mist that had barely dotted the living room ceiling on Alec Bay Road was Sergeant Rod Englert, then a homicide investigator for the
Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland. In the next two decades, Englert would go on to become one of the most renowned experts in the world on blood spatter. The patterns that blood etches as it sprays, splashes, or drains from all manner of wounds—stab, bludgeon, or gunshot—are predictable. Englert was adamant that the high-velocity blood mist had come from a gunshot wound. The amount was too minute for him to say whether it was animal blood or human blood, but the Portland detective said positively that it had risen from the flesh of some creature who had been shot.
Criminalist Michael Grubb testified about the Smith & Wesson .38 found in Ruth’s dresser drawer. Although someone had given it a cursory cleaning, he had examined it under a high-powered microscope. And he had found eight small blood droplets on the face of the gun’s cylinder, one blood flake which was loose but still adhering to the extractor shroud, and two small blood spots under the thumbpiece (the mechanism that slides forward to release the cylinder). Each spot proved positive for the presence of blood. Whoever cleaned the gun would not have noticed those last spots when the thumbpiece was in its normal position.
The person shot would not have been more than three feet from the shooter, probably less.
Nellie Horan, the office manager of the Journal, testified that Ruth had placed classified ads on August 20, 1980, to sell Rolf’s Mustang, camper, boat, and the home itself.
Ruth didn’t advertise Rolf’s clothing; she had offered that to Joy Stroup, whose husband was about the same size. Joy had declined.
Everyone had been afraid of a mistrial, but so far this trial had evaded any number of pitfalls. One thing nobody worried much about was the weather. Winter storms in the Northwest almost always meant heavy rain and high winds, but everyone was used to that. Snow didn’t fall that often, and when it did, it rarely stayed on the ground. It usually melted within a day.
But during Thanksgiving week 1985, a blizzard warning for the San Juan Islands caused a great deal of consternation. Two upcoming witnesses for the prosecution who drew a good deal of interest were flying all the way from Norway. Harald Naeslund and Eugenie Marie Naeslund Lindboe, Rolf’s siblings, had waited five years to see justice done for their brother, and they were determined to tell the jury about him and the odd way he had suddenly dropped out of their lives.
But now there was a question of whether Harald and Eugenie’s plane could land safely and if they could get from SeaTac Airport south of Seattle all the way up to Friday Harbor.
A foot of snow fell, completely transforming the landscape in the San Juan Islands, choking the roads and streets, and disrupting ferry schedules. The temperature stayed frigid, and the snow did not melt. It was lovely to look at, but almost every business was forced to shut down.
The trial did not. The jury was adamant that they would not allow a snowstorm to cause a mistrial, not at this point.
“We made up our minds we would get to court any way we could,” Lisa Boyd says. “It was easier, of course, for the jurors who lived in Friday Harbor. For the whole trial, many of us had to catch the 7:00 A.M. boat from Orcas to San Juan and we didn’t get home until 7:00 P.M. With the added problem of the snowdrifts, that was a challenge.”
But not impossible. It was arranged that Deputy Steve Vierthaler would drive as close as he could to jurors’ homes on what roads were still passable on Orcas, and they would hike out to meet him.
“I had to walk through snow up to my knees for half a mile,” Lisa Boyd said. “We all had to, and then we had to share his vehicle with his German Shepherd K-9 dog, but Steve got us to the ferry.”
It would be four days before the snow melted off the narrow back roads, but the Neslund trial continued without interruption.
One juror described the scene in Friday Harbor the day after Thanksgiving. “Several of us went out to dinner after that day of trial,” she remembers. “We had to look for some place that was even open. Walking through Friday Harbor was like being in a Fairyland with all that snow. We felt like the only people on the planet...”
The roof of the new courthouse sprang a leak during the snowstorm. “We came to work one morning,” Court Clerk Mary Jean Cahail remembered, “and, of all things, the ceiling had leaked onto the lid of the Neslunds’ trunk where it sat right there in the courtroom! We wondered what else could happen, but, fortunately, it didn’t hit the part of the trunk that held the stains and hair.”
Rolf’s brother and sister made it to Friday Harbor. And the next day, Harald Naeslund recalled the adventurous life Rolf had lived and his devotion to his family. Harald testified that five years earlier he and his wife had been looking forward to an October visit to Rolf and Ruth’s lovely home. Harald’s wife would be seventy, and Rolf would be eighty that fall, an occasion to celebrate for both of them. Their plane tickets were for October 29, just six days before Rolf’s birthday.
Harald said that Rolf had been content to be home from the sea, and full of plans to fix up his house and property. On the stand, he read from a letter Rolf had sent him on June 17, 1980, saying how much he appreciated being on solid land at last. “There’s too much to do from early in the morning,” he wrote. “About 10:00 A.M. I get life in my body and begin to think about what to do.”
His last message to his brother in Norway was dated August 4, 1980—an enthusiastic postcard urging them to hurry and visit so they could swim in the Neslunds’ new pool.
And then, nothing.
It was Ruth who called on September 10 to say that Rolf had left her, and there was no need for them to come because their brother wasn’t there any longer.
Eugenie Lindboe was not a young woman, but she walked with grace, her head held high. Her hair was still dark brown and skillfully cut, and she wore a black sweater, a mink vest, and a plaid black and white skirt. Around her neck, Eugenie wore several gold chains with charms and coins, and her shiny black boots reached to her knees. She had clearly come from money. The Naeslund family background was aristocratic, and Eugenie and Harald obviously wanted to explain that their lost brother was not a throwaway person or a confused and senile old man who had been ready to die.
Eugenie walked down the courtroom aisle rapidly, and, with her back to the gallery and the defense and prosecution tables, she held her right hand high to take the oath.
Then she climbed the few steps to the witness chair, but she did not sit down immediately. Still standing, she turned deliberately, and rested her hands on the rail. For what seemed like minutes, Eugenie stared at Ruth Neslund, willing her to look up and meet her eyes. Ruth would not do it. And then Eugenie shook her head negatively. Without saying a word, she had said whole chapters.
Finally, she sat down in the witness chair. Eugenie spoke English perfectly but, of course, with a distinct Scandinavian accent. She talked of happier times, her voice modulated but close to breaking. Rather than dissolve into tears, Eugenie occasionally fell silent until she regained her composure. She stressed that Rolf had not come to see them in Norway during the summer of 1980 or any time after. And Ruth had stopped calling her, despite her promise to stay in touch so they could find Rolf.
“He was not only my brother, he was one of my best friends,” Eugenie said bleakly.
Twenty
The state had hoped to finish its case before Thanksgiving, and the defense expected to begin after the long holiday weekend. They didn’t make that time limit, but they weren’t far off the mark. Now the big question was: Will Ruth take the witness stand? She had indicated even before her trial that she was anxious to tell her story, and she was confident that the jurors and everyone else would see that she had been falsely accused.
But it’s a rule of thumb among defense lawyers in cases involving criminal violence that the appearance of the defendant on the witness stand is almost always bad news. Some may come across as too confident or cocky, others may irritate jurors, and some may give away too much information. Once a murder defendant testifies, he (or she) opens himself up to cross-examination by the prosecution an
d to questions that defense attorneys’ wiser judgment never want to be asked.
No matter what Fred Weedon or Ellsworth Connelly advised, those who knew Ruth Neslund felt she would do as she pleased. She trusted Weedon and she had leaned on him for years, but she was a stubborn woman who, in the end, made her own decisions.
Fred Weedon answered all the questions that had been posed earlier on Monday, December 2, as he made his opening statements. He laid out his case for the jurors, and he exuded confidence as he did so. If he had tried to dissuade Ruth from testifying, he gave no indication. Instead, he said she would testify, and she “would welcome the opportunity to speak after years and years of island gossip.”
Not only would the defendant give the jury the true story of her last night with her husband, Weedon promised to present witnesses who had seen Rolf Neslund after he was alleged to have vanished.
There would be testimony from people who had observed that Rolf was so depressed after the bridge accident two years earlier that he had spoken of suicide. “He was an eighty-year-old man who was getting forgetful, an eighty-year-old man who was increasingly concerned about his own mortality,” Weedon reminded the jurors.
Hadn’t Elinor Ekenes testified that she had dinner with Rolf on August 5, 1980, and that she had advised him to “run away to Norway”? Weedon portrayed Rolf as “a man torn between two loves,” a situation that must have only contributed to his depression.
“I do not stand here to try to put a halo over Ruth’s head,” Weedon said easily. “It’s not going to fit.” Ruth was an admitted heavy drinker and her marriage to Rolf had become storm-tossed and angry. Yes, they had an argument on August 8. And, yes, Ruth had called her niece in Ohio. But Weedon insisted that Ruth and Rolf had made up after that call, and then they had sat down to dinner together.