No Regrets

the searchers sprayed the area with Leucomalachite Green or Luminol. What looked at first glance like rust or grime showed up as blood left on the frame of the sliding glass doors of the tub in the master bathroom, and they found similar stains on the walls of both the master bedroom and bathroom. There was even a faint path of droplets between the master bedroom and a bathroom on the other end of the hallway. A large stain resembling the imprint of a hand appeared on a carpet pad in the living room along this path.
    The handles of a wheelbarrow reacted to the chemical agents, too.
    With further testing, all of the stains proved to be Type A human blood. In certain areas—like the concrete slabs—there was so much blood that the person who had bled there would have to have suffered a major wound, probably a fatal wound.
    The two most common blood types are A Positive and O Positive. Ruth Neslund had A Positive blood, but no one knew what blood type Rolf had.
    When the stains, spatters, and mist the detectives found proved to be human blood, the only further information criminalists could determine was the blood type. It was 1982. There wasn’t enough to test for enzymes that might isolate the blood by racial pattern. But it was A Positive. That could have come from Ruth’s veins sometime over the many years she had lived in the house.
    They couldn’t be more specific; DNA would not come into play for another dozen years.
    The deputies and criminalists were collecting so much possible evidence in their second search that they had to go back to the judge and ask for an extension of their search warrant, but, in the end, it was worth it. They had bagged and labeled hundreds of pieces of physical evidence from the tiniest of possible blood specks to those heavy chunks of concrete floor.
    One of the last items they bagged into evidence was the Reader’s Digest edition of
To Catch a Killer.
It had never been moved from Ruth’s coffee table in the year between searches.
    “This time we took it,” Joe Caputo said. “It seemed pertinent.”
    It was March 12, 1982, before Ruth was allowed to return home. She confided to anyone who would listen that the damnable lawmen had almost destroyed her home, complaining that they had left her house in shambles, pawed through her papers, left their muddy footprints, dust, and dirt, without regard to her nostalgic feelings about the home she had shared with Rolf for so many years. She claimed that her front door was damaged, her septic field and lawn dug up, and her peace of mind erased.
    Caputo was one of the searchers assigned to the septic tank—not the most palatable job. “It was pumped out and it was pretty clean, but we had to do a close inspection of the drain filter.”
    The other job that nobody wanted was wading through the swimming pool that Rolf had been so proud of, that he’d been anxious to show off to his brother and sister when they came from Norway. “It had about six inches of duck crap and mud in it,” Caputo recalled. “And that allhad to be sifted. Ruth said that Perry Mortensen shot holes in the pool to let it drain, but that was not a true story. Perry was a hilarious guy, but he did not shoot holes in that pool.”
    Ruth, however, said she had been almost ready to open a lovely bed-and-breakfast so that she would have some way to support herself. Things were in wonderful shape, and now that was delayed for heaven knew how long. Ruth even told the
Journal
that she had found several uncapped liquor bottles and believed that the sheriff’s men had been drinking her liquor while they searched!
    It was a ridiculous charge, but it appeared in print. Sheriff Sheffer defended his men. They had worked many hours of overtime, and were exhausted when they finally cleared the Neslund house. And, of course, they hadn’t touched Ruth Neslund’s liquor supply.
    “The only thing we drank in there,” Clever remembered, “was some terrible grape pop that we brought in with us.”
    Ruth no longer liked Joe Caputo. She told her attorneys to be sure and mention in her documents demanding compensation for the losses she had suffered from the search that she had been shocked to find that he had “snuck his wife in there—in my house and she stayed over! I was stunned.”
    So was Caputo when he heard that rumor. “I didn’t have a wife,” he said. “I didn’t even have a girlfriend at the time. I don’t know why she said that.”
    Sheffer told reporters