No Regrets

that the biggest handicap they worked under was the time that had passed—at least a year and a half—since Rolf was last seen. Ruth certainly hadn’t reported him as a missing person; it had taken his fellow ship pilots to sound the first tentative alarm and thatcame six months after Rolf had gone missing. The first search had been so restrictive in scope that they had found only the .22 bullet casings in the burn barrel.
    Following behind the backhoe, the four deputies had sifted through dirt on the chance that they would find bones. This had taken many hours, but they found only occasional animal bones.
    Now Ray Clever set out to determine Rolf Neslund’s blood type. The old man hadn’t donated blood, one source that often worked in detectives’ inquiries. His siblings and sons were currently in another country, and while their blood types might help in determining Neslund’s type, it wasn’t a sure thing. It was a “catch 22” situation. They were trying to prove that Rolf was dead, but if he was alive, medical personnel had to protect patient personal information. They refused to release the information that Clever needed to show that Rolf was deceased. And he didn’t have enough probable cause to get a search warrant to allow that. Clever checked with almost every hospital in the Seattle area to see if any lab had a record of Rolf’s blood type.
    “It got increasingly difficult to get any information,” he remembered. “But finally someone let me know that there was that information in their records, although they were not able to tell me the blood type. Still, just my knowing the answer was there proved to be enough to get a search warrant to find out the blood type.”
    Rolf had had surgery in Northgate Hospital for prostate problems, a common ailment in men over sixty. And some of his prostate gland had been retained after his prostatectomy. But there could be a problem with that. The tissue had been preserved in formaldehyde which might have altered the blood chemistry, making it impossible to determine his blood type.
    Bob Keppel started a search for a lab that might be able to isolate the blood type despite the presence of formaldehyde. He located a Dr. Reubenstone in Chicago who had had some luck doing that.
    Clever held his breath. Luckily, they were able to determine Rolf Neslund’s blood type.
    It was A Positive.
    Other crime lab findings on the items and swabs removed from the Neslund home also revealed that the person who had shed so much blood there had Type A Positive blood.
    The .38-caliber revolver in the dresser drawer of the master bedroom bore silent evidence. With the expansion of hot gases as a bullet is fired from the barrel of a gun held at close range, “back spatter”—blood from the target—is drawn back toward the gun, sometimes into the barrel, sometimes on the cylinder. That was the case with this gun, even though it had been wiped cleaned since it was last fired.
    Michael Grubb, a Washington State Patrol criminalist, wrote in his reports that some of the blood spatter found “was from a gunshot wound to the uncovered and hairless area of a human body or an animal, shot from a distance of less than three feet.”
    It would seem that charges would be forthcoming.

Twelve
    If this had been fiction, deductive reasoning would have dictated that someone who was living in the Alec Bay Road house in early to mid-August, 1980, would surely be arrested at any moment.
    But it didn’t happen. The Neslund investigation was an uphill battle for the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, Criminal Prosecutor Charles Silverman, and the attorney general’s team, Greg Canova and Bob Keppel.
    Ruth Neslund was proving to be an uncommonly popular woman on Lopez, and she had a crowd cheering for her. Curiously, she became more popular all the time. She didn’t need to hire a publicist; her own comments and those of her attorney, Fred Weedon—who was taking a leave of absence from the Public Defender’s Office down in Tacoma so that she would have solid legal representation—made her image as a “poor old woman” quite believable.
    The
Seattle Times
printed quotes from island citizens who praised Ruth. “I don’t think she had anything to do with his disappearance,” one man said. “She’s too kind-hearted.”
    “It was common knowledge that he was going to Norway,” another commented. “Something probably happened to him a long way from here. It didn’t happen on