No Regrets

said she could “burn” him. When she had been drinking, she was known for her wild phone calls to relatives. This phone call had begun like all the others, but quickly took on an ominous tone.
    Joy was nervous now, and close to tears as she looked toward the defense table where her aunt sat calmly, her hands folded on the table in front of her.
    Seeing the witness’s discomfiture, Canova moved just enough so that he stood directly in front of her, blocking her view of her aunt. Now Joy would not have to look at Ruth.
    Lisa Boyd, who sat in the first swivel chair in the jury box, felt for Joy. “It had to be the worst thing in her life,” she would recall. “Having to testify against her aunt.”
    “And what did she say?” Canova asked of Joy. “Tell us just what you remember.”
    “That there had been a confrontation with her and Rolf,” Joy said, “and he had hurt her. Ruth told me that Rolf had struck her left breast, and hit her in the nose, doing more damage than he had previously.”
    As Canova asked the witness to describe more of the phone conversation, tears began to course down Joy Stroup’s cheeks, and her voice choked. “I can’t say it...I can’t say it.”
    There was a pause while Joy Stroup took deep breaths and a sip of water.
    Finally, she sobbed as she testified, “She said, ‘Uncle Bob held him and I shot him and he’s now outside burning in a barrel!’ Those were her exact words. ‘Uncle Bob held him and I shot him and he’s now outside burning in a barrel...’”
    The courtroom erupted into gasps and murmurs and then hushed as Judge Bibb warned those in the galley. Ruth never changed expression.
    Joy said that her aunt’s words were so shocking that she could scarcely believe them. She had tried not to believe them. “I told her I was busy at work and would have to call her back. It didn’t affect me then like it does now. I just don’t know what I thought then. At the end of my shift, when I called back, she said it was true, but she didn’t repeat those words...”
    Joy thought that her aunt had mentioned something about calling a “sheriff,” or that “the sheriff was coming,” but could not recall exactly what Ruth Neslund had said.
    During the ensuing weekend, the witness said, she had tried to call Ruth again, but there was no answer. “I was hoping it would be like other instances, that it would be [the next] morning, and everything would be all right.”
    It always had been in the past, no matter how angry her aunt was with her uncle. But there was only the shrilling of a ringing phone in an empty house, and that wasn’t reassuring.
    On Monday, Joy Stroup had heard again from her aunt. “She told me Rolf was in Norway, and she had gone to Bellingham just to get away from there for the weekend.”
    “Did you ask her again about what she had told you?”
    “No. She never brought it up again, either—or denied it or took it back.”
    On cross-examination, Joy Stroup acknowledged that there had been a period of estrangement in her relationship with both her “Aunt Nettie” and her sister Donna after a “little spat” after her father’s funeral in 1969. Actually they had not spoken for eight years.
    Still, it did not diminish the impact of Joy’s testimony—or of Donna’s.
    Robert Myers had not been charged with murder, nor was he called on to testify. He was lost in his own mind, unable to tell reality from nightmares.
    But Paul Myers, seventy-two, was ready to take the stand. He was not any prosecutor’s ideal witness. Like his sister, Paul was a drinker, but he openly admitted it. He wanted very much to testify. Paul had been haunted by the story he heard from his sister and brother. He had confided to Ray Clever that he feared he might even be anaccomplice to murder. He testified that he had been persuaded to haul a section of carpeting to the dump for Ruth. Later, she told him that there were bits of Rolf’s body rolled up in it.
    Now he told the jury what he believed to be the scenario of Rolf Neslund’s last hour in his beloved home. He spoke of what Ruth and Bob had told him when he visited on Lopez Island.
    “She [Ruth] told me she shot Rolf twice in the head and killed him.”
    “Did you believe her?” Greg Canova asked.
    “No, I’d heard so many stories I didn’t believe any of them.”
    Ruth had given Paul most of her standard explanations for Rolf’s being gone. “She said he was in Norway. She told me he’d jumped off the