No Regrets

what sounded like a fearsome story: Joy Stroup had made a bizarre and shocking accusation against Ruth.
    Joy wrote that she wanted to talk to someone in authority about her aunt Ruth. Ruth had evidently called her many times between November 1979 and July 1980. Most of the time, she had been drinking and said crazy things like, “I’m watching Rolf out the window,” and, “I could shoot him from right here.” Sometimes she spoke of “wasting Rolf” or “burning him.”
    Joy’s sister, Donna Smith, lived in the Seattle area. She was the girl who had been like a daughter to Ruth when she was younger, but Donna remembered the time Ruth had locked herself in the bunkhouse to keep Rolf away.Ruth had called her, saying, “If he comes back here, I’m going to shoot him!”
    That was in the fall of 1979, and Ruth had threatened violence toward her husband in numerous phone calls since. Indeed, there had been so many phone calls when Ruth was inebriated that her relatives tended to dismiss them as drunken ravings.
    But Captain Gunnar Olsborg had a sinking feeling about Rolf. He suspected his longtime friend was dead, his body hidden from view.
    San Juan County authorities made arrangements for Joy Stroup to fly to Seattle for a meeting. The Puget Sound Pilots’ Association paid for Joy’s trip. Joy Stroup, Donna Smith, Gunnar Olsborg, San Juan County’s Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Charlie Silverman, Ray Clever, and an attorney met in the Columbia Tower, a soaring building in downtown Seattle.
    This was a clandestine meeting for many reasons. Joy and Donna were afraid of reprisal from their aunt and from other family members, and neither the San Juan County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office or the Sheriff’s Department were able to act on what they heard that day. If anything that the young women described had, indeed, occurred, it still had to be proven.
    An investigation like this would be difficult for a big-city police department and prosecutor; it seemed almost impossible for a small county sheriff and a prosecutor who was far better versed in civil law than in criminal proceedings. Silverman, newly elected, admitted that he felt he was in over his head. Beyond that, San Juan County had few citizens per square mile and their tax base didn’t spew out wealth to pay public servants and court costs for massive investigations.
    Fortunately, the legislature in Washington State voted in a new law in 1981, a statute that would be central to the Rolf Neslund investigation. The State Attorney General’s Office now had a Criminal Division: prosecutors and investigators who, along with the Washington State Patrol’s criminalists, were available to assist some of the state’s smaller and less-affluent counties when they were involved in major probes. Attorney General Ken Eikenberry was sending his top team in to work beside the San Juan County detectives.
    Senior Assistant Attorney General Greg Canova and Criminal Investigator Bob Keppel (the same Keppel who was the first King County detective assigned to the Ted Bundy cases in 1974, and who would later advise the Green River serial murder task force) were young, but they were already two of the smartest and most admired men in Washington State criminal law. Together the AG’s team would soon successfully prosecute murderers years after the killers thought they had, quite literally, gotten away with murder. The Neslund case would be their first.
    Canova and Keppel weren’t taking over—the San Juan County investigators were still principally involved—but the two AG’s men would be there to help, both in the investigation of the Neslund case and to assist in any trial that might evolve.
    Joining the two offices together—the attorney general of the State of Washington and the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office—had to be done tactfully. Luckily, they were not adversaries nor did they encounter “turf wars” over which assignments belonged to one or the other. Indeed, Ray Clever and Bob Keppel would have nothing but praise for one another, and Charlie Silverman, recently out of law school and more versed in civil law than criminal proceedings,said he was relieved to have Greg Canova come on board. The job ahead promised to be difficult and there was every chance that they could not bring charges against anyone because they had no corpse and apparently no witnesses brave enough to come forward and testify in open court.
    Investigating disappearances and