No Regrets

to believe it would happen—not even Ruth Neslund herself. It had been so long, and her new life revolved around her successful Alec Bay Inn. Ruth admitted to a
Post-Intelligencer
reporter that she, too, felt as though she was only a spectator at a theater production. She was sixty-five now, but looked older, walking unsteadily with a four-footed cane, mentioning that her “stroke” had left her “legally blind.”
    “I still don’t believe I’m involved in it,” she said with apparent amazement. “It’s like watching a bad movie. I don’t really know how a thing like this can get snowballing—except it did, with some relatives who have never been very close to me.”
    With tears brimming in her eyes, Ruth said she felt that Rolf had probably committed suicide, explaining how depressed he had been after being responsible for his ship hitting the bridge. “Although,” she whispered, “there are some days when I think he’s going to walk up the driveway.”
    She spoke of hard times they had lived through, always together. Their first house on Lopez Island had burned. It had been a providential coincidence that Ruth was storing all of her valuable antiques in a trailer behind the housewhen it went up in flames, in a fire whose cause was never determined. And, luckily, she had thought to get insurance. She recalled that after they lost the house, she had given Rolf a special Christmas present—plans for a new house she had drawn herself.
    “I had no thought we would actually build it; I thought we were too old, but Rolf looked at the plans for the better part of an hour, and he said, ‘Ruth, why don’t you build it?’”
    With two part-time carpenters, she said, she had done just that. Rolf had painted it. “He was the captain, and I was the crew in the household. I was strong as an ox when I built the house. We moved in in 1978,” she recalled nostalgically. But things had gone wrong after the bridge fell. “His mind was going,” Ruth told reporters. “The captain was hallucinating some and drinking a lot. Ever since the ship hit the bridge, he brooded a lot. He would sit for three or four hours at a time, only getting up to fix himself a highball.”
    Rolf, of course, was not there to give his side of their story, and it was easy for young reporters to feel sorry for the aging might-be-widow. There were many on Lopez Island who raved about what a wonderful person Ruth was. “I was enthralled with her the day I met her,” a male acquaintance offered. “She is extremely generous with her time and personal things. She’d hear about a child who didn’t have a bicycle, and would say, ‘Oh, I have one in my garage. Why don’t they take that?’”
    Ruth said she was hurt by those “who have found me guilty already. I do have some supportive friends, and I try to be strong and survive. I don’t sleep very well. I wonder about it a lot. I wonder about my own mortality in this very stressful time.”
    Ruth said she kept busy running her bed-and-breakfast, playing the organ and piano by ear, and was diverting herself by learning to play the banjo.
    Despite Ruth Neslund’s fans and friends, and her newly docile and mild demeanor for the press, Ray Clever had his own opinions, based on the facts he and Bob Keppel and other deputies had uncovered. He snorted in disgust as he read her pretrial coverage. “She just radiated evil. I believe that she was fully capable of everything she was accused of.”

Eighteen
    It was almost Halloween 1985, perhaps an apt date for a trial which promised ghastly details to start. At last, it was beginning. The Washington State Court of Appeals had upheld the prosecution’s right to present the hundreds of items of physical evidence. Judge Bibb said he would allow Greg Canova and Charles Silverman to present their case in any order they chose.
    Of all ploys that defense attorneys in high-profile cases usually invoke, a request for a change of venue—seeking to relocate a trial to a more neutral territory—is the most often used. But Fred Weedon and Ellsworth Connelly had never asked for that. Sheriff Ray Sheffer had a theory on that. Off-islanders seem to view the rugged folk who lived in San Juan County as a bit more “primitive” than those who live on the mainland. “There’s absolutely a feeling about islanders,” he suggested, “that there’s a backwoods mentality, that there are a lot of moonshiners, and so on.”
    Perhaps if this trial were held