No Regrets

she talked, the more she raised the deputies’ suspicions. Ruth said she knew there had been gossip on Lopez. She was well aware that a man who lived on Lopez was spreading rumors that Rolf was dead.
    “I made him apologize to me once for gossiping about someone I was supposed to be married to before Rolf.”
    But, oddly, Ruth said she hadn’t confronted the man for saying that Rolf was dead. She didn’t comment on why she hadn’t done so.
    Ruth Neslund’s conversation skipped along like a stone flung upon the waves.
    “Rolf drinks like a European, you know,” she said. “That means beer in the morning almost every day, sherry in the afternoon, and several highballs before dinner, and then wine and Aquavit with dinner.”
    She explained that all that drinking only made Rolf’s diabetes worse. “And it made his blood toxic, too,” Ruth said firmly. “That’s why I tried to make excuses for him when he started hitting me. He never remembered later about fighting with me.”
    After two visits from Clever and Doss in two days, Ruth Neslund was becoming more agitated and more talkative, but she wasn’t giving much information that was helpful about where her husband might be six months after he reportedly stalked out of their home, saying either that he was never coming back, or that he might be back after the first of the year. It was now the end of February. The “first of the year” had come and gone.
    Ruth was also angry. “She phoned our undersheriff, Rod Tvrdy,” Clever said. “She admitted to him that she might have embroidered some of the things she told us, but she said that was because she didn’t like the ‘California detective’s’ questions, so she’d made some things up.”
    Ruth had singled Clever out as her least-favorite deputy, and she particularly resented what she considered his “arrogant California attitude.” What she did not know was she had previously dealt with another investigator from California: Joe Caputo, Greg Doss’s former partner.
    “Ruth always liked me,” Joe Caputo recalled. “She evidently didn’t know where I was from . . .”
    •  •  •
    Joe grew up in Old Town in San Diego, and then in Escondido and San Marcos. He didn’t start out wanting to be a cop; he went to school to be a dental technician. Even though he eventually had his own dental lab, he admitted to himself that he’d never been “all that interested” in dental work. A cousin was a reserve officer for the Escondido Police Department and Joe joined, too.
    “I realized then,” he said, “that that was what I really wanted to do.”
    He was on several departments’ waiting lists for entry-level positions in southern California when he made a trip to Lopez Island to visit his cousin who was working as a San Juan County deputy. Ironically, the cousin went back to work as a dental tech, and in 1978 Joe replaced him. Like Clever, Caputo was single and didn’t mind being either on patrol or on standby for forty-eight-hour shifts as there were only two deputies assigned to Lopez. One was off-duty while the other was on.
    “I liked Lopez and the unique people there,” Caputo recalled. “I must have had fifteen places where I could count on a cup of coffee or a piece of pie. I enjoyed my time on Lopez. I stopped by Rolf and Ruth’s place a number of times for a brief visit or to pick up some flats of strawberries that Ruth was selling.”
    Caputo liked both Ruth and Rolf, but he and Greg Doss had been called to settle the Neslunds’ domestic disputes from time to time. “Rolf was always sitting in his ‘Easy Boy’ recliner,” Caputo recalled. “He sat there bleeding from his head and face, and Ruth didn’t show anything in the way of injuries—only those marks that she claimed were burns from her oven.”
    Joe Caputo felt that Rolf always got the worst of their fights. “I don’t think that Rolf would ever have hit awoman. Ruth was bigger than he was—she put on weight over the years—but Rolf had these massive forearms. He always reminded me of Popeye; his arms just bulged out beneath his short-sleeved shirt. Ship pilots had to climb from tugboats up maybe fifty, sixty feet onto ships on these rope ladders, lots of times in bad weather. He had to have arms like that to make it.”
    When Ruth had been drinking, which was usually the case before the Neslunds’ fights, Caputo found her to be “the type that people would be embarrassed to be around—she wasn’t the