No Regrets

murders wasn’t something that deputies on a small and mostly friendly island were often called upon to do. They had to keep performing their regular duties, and most of the deputies kept their own files with them. Computers certainly weren’t part of their filing system—nor were they standard equipment in either Seattle or Spokane law enforcement offices at the time.
    Ray Clever was a man who made lists. When he found what he sought or finished performing some task he felt essential to his investigation in the Neslund case, he checked it off. And then he made new and longer lists. If what he discovered seemed positive, he wrote “Bingo!” in his notebooks. Initially, he didn’t have many “Bingos!”
    Bob Keppel was also a detail man. Known as a brilliant interrogator, Keppel’s other forte is organization. Even when computers were in an embryonic stage when the “Ted” serial killer was still roving in Washington, Oregon, and Utah back in the midseventies, Keppel used a “stone-age” computer to winnow out a half dozen names from a roster of thousands of “Ted” suspects. One of those names was Theodore Bundy.
    By 1982 Keppel had mastered the art of organizing information and evidence in criminal cases. He was able to take all the different working files of the San Juan deputies and coalesce the information into a tightly organized narrative of the disappearance of an eighty-year-old man.
    •  •  •
    The question remained: Could such an impressive lineup of lawmen prevail over one sweet-faced, elderly woman who might, indeed, have a problem with alcohol, but who continued to present herself to the world as a woman scorned, a long-suffering wife betrayed, a lone woman who wanted only to keep her home, grow her flowers, visit with her family, and find some happiness in her “golden years”?
    And would Joy Stroup and Donna Smith be brave enough to come forward with what they knew in a court of law?

Nine
    It had not been easy for either the lawmen or those who rushed to support Ruth Neslund. The
Journal of the San Juan Islands
and the
Friday Harbor Record
were sometimes thorns in the Sheriff’s Department’s side, continually nagging at them to do something, or even worse, suggesting that they were humorously incompetent.
    But they also printed rumors that upset and angered Ruth. Wary now, Ruth “lawyered up,” first with Mitch Cogdill of Everett and then switching to Fred Weedon, who had been in charge of the Public Defender’s Office in Pierce County in Tacoma. Weedon was a savvy criminal lawyer who spent vacations on Lopez Island and Ruth considered him a “neighbor” she could trust.
    Cogdill and Weedon were vocal in their criticism of law enforcement. The local papers printed their statements dutifully, and half the county seemed to feel Ruth was being unfairly besieged.
    The sheriff’s men were thwarted in their efforts to investigate further. They had followed through on their search warrant back in April 1981, and they’d found nothing. Ruth was now officially Rolf’s trustee, and it looked as though she was going to win her jousting with the Pilots’ Association and continue to receive his eighteen-hundred-dollar-a-month pension.
    Rolf’s disappearance was far from an ordinary case, and it had to be worked “backward.” Because there was no body, it didn’t really seem like a murder case. Washington courts had yet to convict a murderer when there was no corpse to establish that a crime had been committed. There was always the possibility that Rolf would come home and that there might even be a happy ending. Even if he was dead, there wasn’t the sense of tragedy about the demise of a man who was somewhere between eighty or eighty-three that there would be if the victim had died young. Rolf had had a good life, a fulfilling life. His reputation as a man who had known many women was familiar to the pilots he worked with over the years. But they also agreed that his libido had probably cooled considerably as he grew older. Still, was it possible that Ruth was on target as she continued to claim he had left her for more sexual dalliance? If Rolf had managed to sneak away with a lover (definitely not Elinor Ekenes, but perhaps some other woman), then he might even serve as a shining example of senior citizen virility to other men of middle age and even beyond.
    Both Rolf and Ruth had remained close to their extended families over the years; Ruth had been a second mother to