No Regrets

retired and no longer had a job that would take him out to sea or on Puget Sound, steering ships into port.
    As suspicious as the deputies were—and they were— there was no solid evidence that Rolf had not left his home of his own accord. It would take a lot more than his “abandoned” wife’s ever-changing stories to bring charges against her.
    The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office expanded their inquiries into Rolf Neslund’s life and habits. They talked to his neighbors and his many friends, especially the ship pilots who knew him so well. Every interview indicated that he was a man of precise habit, a man who was gregarious and who kept in close touch with both his relatives and his friends. Ray Clever doubted that such a man would have voluntarily walked away from his life six months earlier. It didn’t make sense.
    Sheriff Ray Sheffer, Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy, Greg Doss, Ray Clever, Joe Caputo, and Perry Mortensen, along with other deputies brought into the search for Neslund, didn’t know what had happened to him, but they were determined to find the old ship’s pilot—alive ...or dead.
    It would not be easy.
    The investigators began to examine Rolf Neslund’s life as minutely as if they were looking through a microscope. Could they find some forewarning, signal, or hint about where he might be? If he was alive somewhere, surely he should have been in contact with someone. And if he was alive, was there some way to entice him to walk out of the shadows?
    If he was dead, where were his remains? Perhaps hidden in the depths of the Strait of Juan de Fuca? There are so many stretches of open water around the San Juan Islands and Seattle, and there had been several instances where people had simply vanished from ferryboats wending their way between the mainland and the islands of Washington: suicides, accidents, deliberate disappearances...or, perhaps, murder. Under the darkness of night, all it would have taken was a leap over a ferry’s railor a swift push from someone stronger and younger than Rolf Neslund was.
    Maybe he was buried somewhere on Lopez Island. He wouldn’t be the first victim to be dispatched and then buried in a hidden—but shallow—grave. Most of western Washington is made up of anything but rich loam. Without heavy-duty equipment, a makeshift grave is of necessity a shallow grave; any shovel hits rocks just beneath the surface. As one forensic anthropologist testified in a murder trial, “All makeshift graves in Washington State are ‘shallow graves.’”
    Joe Caputo spent a lot of time walking the fields around the Neslund property—both on- and off-duty. “I’d get permission from property owners to do my ‘walk-abouts’ scrutinizing the fields and brush. If Rolf was buried there, I didn’t want the site turning up years later.”
    But Caputo didn’t come across a lonely grave. And unless a body is discovered, it is very difficult to prove unequivocally in a court of law that a human being is no longer living.
    Laymen tend to believe that the term “corpus delicti” refers to the actual corpse of a homicide victim. In truth, corpus delicti is the body of the case—not the body of the victim. But if detectives and prosecutors can come up with enough circumstantial evidence to convince a “reasonable man (or woman)” that a murder had occurred, it isn’t technically necessary to show a jury or a judge photographs of a body, a crime scene, or an autopsy report.
    If it looks like a rat, squeals like a rat, smells like a rat, acts like a rat, then it just might be a rat. That would be an example of circumstantial evidence and deductive reasoning. Still, in the early eighties there were very few cases inWashington State—if any—where murder convictions had resulted when no body was ever discovered.
    The San Juan County investigators believed that Rolf Neslund had been dead for at least twenty months, but they had to find a way to prove that.
    All of us who are still breathing can be tracked by paper trails—credit-card purchases, phone calls, tax filings, bank deposits or withdrawals, medical care sought, letters, sightings, or chance meetings. Rolf had a bank account in Norway where he kept the several thousand dollars left to him in his mother’s will. He had not withdrawn any of the money there, nor had he tried to access any of the bank accounts he shared with Ruth for substantial amounts of cash—not after August 8, 1980.
    All the checks written were