No Regrets

call.
    “He’s out,” Ruth said first, “but he should be back in a minute.”
    When Donna didn’t hear his voice on the phone, she asked Ruth again where he was.
    “He’s out on the property somewhere,” Ruth said vaguely, “but I can’t find him.”
    Finally, Donna asked her why Rolf hadn’t responded to Ruth’s shouts to tell him he was wanted on the phone, and Ruth changed Rolf’s alleged location once again and said, “Oh, he’s over in Anacortes. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
    By the time Donna hung up, she was highly suspicious. Why would her aunt give three different explanations about Rolf in one conversation?
    Since Donna lived closest to her aunt and uncle, she was the one chosen to keep calling Ruth. Ruth told her the story about her upcoming divorce, and explained that Rolf had gone to Norway with Elinor Ekenes.
    None of it had reassured Donna and Joy. When they talked to their mother, Mamie, she said that Ruth had told her an entirely different story. Annoyed that Donna was questioning her so closely about Rolf’s location, Ruth told Mamie that Rolf was in Maine and that she was going to drive back there to get him. “I’ll show him to Donna,”Ruth sniffed, “if that’s what it will take to shut her up.”
    In still another call to her oldest sister, Ruth used one of her other explanations about her husband’s whereabouts. “He’s in Greece—waiting for this to all blow over,” she said with just as much certainty as her other accountings for Rolf’s mysterious absence.
    With further phone calls from Mamie, there were more excuses. “Rolf’s on a world cruise,” Ruth said, without explaining why he would have gone on such a trip alone. “He’s going to dock soon in Seattle. I’m going to bring him over to Donna’s and bring her a dozen roses, too, to apologize to her.”
    By 1982, Ruth, in reality, was very angry with Donna Smith; she believed that Donna was the one who had told family secrets to the investigators. She phoned Donna on her birthday and said that she would be sending her “thirty dimes—thirty pieces of silver for payment for betraying me.”
    Donna told the detectives that she was deathly afraid of Ruth, and what she might do in revenge. Hers was not an isolated instance of fear. Almost every friend and family member Clever and Keppel talked to eventually expressed an intense fear of Ruth.
    In a way, it seemed ridiculous that anyone would be afraid of this plump, short woman with dimpled hands and a tightly curled old-fashioned perm.
    But then, Rolf was still gone, and gone within a day or so of his first expression of trepidation about his wife’s dangerousness. Joy Stroup, Donna Smith, and Paul Myers were coming to the forefront of witnesses who would surely make an impact on some future jury. Ruth’s phone bills showed scores of calls back to Ohio and Illinois, and also to Donna, who lived in the Seattle area.
    •  •  •
    When Ruth finally ferreted out information that suggested Joy had given statements to the investigators, she stopped sending her money.
    In October 1982, Ruth Neslund was briefly hospitalized. The Sheriff’s Office was told that she had suffered a stroke—which Ray Clever found was not true. Most people on Lopez Island believed she was at death’s door.

Fifteen
    By 1983, no one but the investigators from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, the prosecutor’s office, and the Attorney General’s Office believed that Ruth Neslund would ever go on trial for the murder of her missing husband—or for anything else. Rolf had been gone from Lopez Island for three years, and she was still living at her Alec Bay home. She had apparently bounced back from her stroke, and was enthusiastic about her newest enterprise. One of the local papers wrote a glowing review as Ruth’s long-awaited business venture debuted. It was remarkable in that there was not one mention of Ruth’s infamy in the Northwest.
    “Lopez’s First Bed and Breakfast,” the headline read. The large photograph of Ruth accompanying the article showed a sweet-faced older woman placing silverware next to a gold-rimmed plate, with a baroque mirror, a polished sideboard, and shining silver candelabra behind her, and a glittering crystal chandelier above.
    The Alec Bay Inn had just opened, and Ruth Neslund was offering guests four “attractive and comfortable bedrooms, with queen-sized beds, and wood-burning stove in each. Two rooms feature private