No Regrets

Rolf had left their home on Monday, August 11, 1980—a little more than six months earlier. After consulting a calendar, she changed her statement a little.
    “You know, it might have been the Thursday after that—the fourteenth,” she mused. “I really can’t remember which. I recall that he took his clothes, and he wanted some of the furniture. But he never came back to get it.”
    Ruth said that she had come across Rolf’s favorite vehicle—his Lincoln Continental—in the employees parking lot of the ferry dock over on the Anacortes side of the ferry run. But that had occurred by chance some two or threeweeks after Rolf walked out on her. She had then arranged to bring the car back to their residence.
    Considering that they had been married for almost twenty years, it seemed odd that Ruth was so sanguine about her longtime husband’s disappearance, but she continued to discuss the precise details of his leavetaking in a dispassionate way. It was as if he had only stepped out to go to the store for milk and bread, never to return.
    Maybe she had grown tired of their relationship; perhaps she had come to accept that he wasn’t coming back to her in the six months since he’d left her. Different people face life-changing events in their own way. Clever didn’t know Ruth at all; she might just be a stoic woman, long since grown used to disappointment in her life.
    Ruth told them that she was pretty sure she knew why Rolf had left her. She had always suspected that he was sneaking around with a woman named Elinor Ekenes, his old girlfriend from way back in 1961. She’d been suspicious of their relationship for as long as she could remember. In fact, she believed that Rolf was currently with Elinor—the two of them flying away together.
    “Rolf’s gone off to Norway with Elinor,” she said firmly. “I did my best. I followed him all the way to Norway. I took Flight 726 on Scandinavian Airways.”
    “When was that?” Clever asked.
    “I think it was on October 10,” Ruth said. “I spent two days in Norway looking for him. But I didn’t find them.”
    No, she said she hadn’t contacted any of his family members in his native country because she didn’t think they’d know where he was.
    Clever jotted the information about her flight to Norway in his notebook. “Fine,” he said, smiling. “We can check on that and you’ll be on the list of passengers.”
    As he glanced up, he saw that the lines in Ruth Neslund’s face had suddenly rearranged themselves into a mask of shock. “She was really startled,” he recalled. “Her face just dropped and her mouth hung open. She hadn’t expected anyone to follow up on what she told us. She figured we’d just go away and be satisfied with her version of where her husband was.”
    A man in his fifties—or even sixties—might be expected to leave his wife and a comfortable home in a midlife crisis and take off with another woman. But eighty? It didn’t ring true to either Greg Doss or Ray Clever, and Ruth Neslund noticed their doubt.
    Her answers became much more guarded as they questioned her about her flight to catch Rolf with her rival. She wasn’t giving nearly as many details, and her hands fluttered nervously in her lap as they continued to ask more specific questions about why Rolf had left—and when.
    Doss and Clever spent about half an hour in the Neslunds’ home, with the interview growing more stilted as the minutes passed. Ruth had gradually turned toward Greg Doss, whose questions weren’t as accusing, dismissing Ray Clever. It was apparent that she didn’t care for Clever or his constant note-taking.
    When they left, she was far less animated than she had been. As they drove away, Clever remarked to Doss, “I don’t know whether she killed him or not, but she did something to him, and she’s lying to us.”
    They were back at the Neslund house the next day. Ray Clever read Ruth her Miranda rights again, and asked if she would be willing to continue their conversation. Ruth seemed somewhat more relaxed than she had been when they left. Again, she said, “Of course.”
    The investigators proceeded, deliberately giving theimpression that they believed that Rolf Neslund might have left of his own accord, but could subsequently have had an accident or even died of a stroke or heart attack. Clever asked Ruth if she had a current photograph of her husband, and she gestured toward several color photos on an end table. They were mostly