No Regrets

Neslund’s door. They had been authorized to search her five-thousand-square-foot house and the almost eight acres of land around it, and they were going to look for anything they might find that would give even a hint about where Rolf was.
    Winnie Kay Stafford and Ruth were present when the second search began at 11:02 A.M . The disgruntled women left two and a half hours later, but Ruth came back the next day to pick up her blood-pressure cuff and a hot water bottle, complaining to everyone within earshot that it was terrible that an ill woman should be treated so badly, forced out of her own home while cops pawed through her belongings.
    She snarled at Ray Clever, “There are about fifty people who would like to come in here and squeeze your head!”
    A few minutes later, she phoned the searchers and demanded that they turn off the outside lights, even though it was she who had absentmindedly left them on in the daytime.
    Ruth’s attorneys called the search “preposterous.” Neither they nor their client had seen the affidavit listing what the searchers were looking for. “We think there’s no basisfor it. We have no problem with them taking a look at what’s there, because maybe that will shut them up once and for all.”
    Still, her lawyers were scornful about how the investigators were carrying out their search. “They’re just going along on their merry way.”
    Ruth, he said, was taking the search “very hard. It not only creates a physical hardship by her being displaced from her home—but serious emotional trauma as well.”
    Furthermore, even though she had no formal charges levied against her, Mitch Cogdill said Ruth was being tried by “innuendo” and hinted darkly that there might be a civil suit against the Sheriff’s Office forthcoming because the deputies and criminalists had “appropriated her property, damaged her property, and made obvious charges against her.”
    The baffling case was gaining more publicity all the time, and now residents of Seattle and the rest of the state were watching the search on the evening news. KOMO-TV sent a helicopter to fly over the house on Alec Bay Road, and photographers filmed the bare earth that appeared here and there in the pastureland where a backhoe had scraped the ground looking for, perhaps, a grave.
    KOMO news anchors also revealed the matter of the meat-grinder. Ruth had owned one, but she sold it in mid-1981 to a couple who owned a meat-packing plant on Lopez. Jean Plummer, a Lopez butcher who lived on Port Stanley Road, turned over the items she bought from Ruth: (1) meat-grinder, (1) grinding auger, and (4) grinding and cutting attachments.
    Fortunately, the Plummers had never used the meat-grinder, possibly deterred by the rumors. Joe Caputo picked it up from them, but when the Washington StatePatrol Crime Lab ran tests on it, no speck or stain of human blood was present in the mechanism.
    Even so, the meat-grinder version was the most steadfast of all the rumors circulating about the fate of Rolf Neslund.
    Those who had enjoyed Ruth’s sausages in the past lost their appetites.
    During the ten days of the 1982 search, life went on on Lopez Island, and Ruth was sometimes relegated to the back pages of the local paper. As the search continued at her house, the
Journal
ran another story with seemingly more interesting local news: The girls’ basketball team from Lopez High School was welcomed home by a huge crowd after being the first team from Lopez Island to have participated in the Washington State final play-offs. Even though they didn’t win, the teenagers had a police and fire department escort with sirens wide open.
    There was also a long feature on a crackdown on Lopez Island dogs—warning their owners to keep a closer eye on them. There wasn’t a leash law yet, but there could be if the canines kept chasing livestock.
    All the while—and for almost two weeks—investigators swarmed over the Neslund home while Ruth complained that she had to depend on the kindness of friends or stay at motels.
    The April 1981 search of the Neslunds’ home and acreage had netted only that single bullet. Fortunately for the investigators the current search a year later was much more successful in terms of physical evidence. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the second processing of the property finally opened doors for further investigation.
    The law enforcement officers moving in and out of Ruth’s house kept scrupulous