No Regrets

ferry, [because he was] despondent over hitting the bridge with a ship. I knew that was false ’cause I knew Rolf.”
    “Do you know why Rolf was shot?”
    “My brother Robert told me it was about money,” Paul testified. Robert had explained that Rolf was angry when he found out that Ruth had transferred his pension and all his money into her bank accounts. “Rolf told Ruth to put the money back—‘or else!’ Robert said he got ‘or else.’”
    Paul said he had overheard Ruth and Bob talking about what they had done. Apparently, Ruth had instructed Bob to hold Rolf while she went to her bedroom to retrieve her handgun. After she shot him, he had fallen backward over the couch.
    Although he wasn’t at the Alec Bay house when Rolf was killed, Paul Myers said that he had been sitting at Ruth’s bar in the Neslunds’ sunroom on two occasions when Robert and Ruth were telling two of her womenfriends, Wanda Post and Winnie Kay Stafford, about what had happened to Rolf. He heard them clearly as they’d made no effort to talk quietly.
    Ruth was not as composed during her brother’s testimony as she had been when her nieces spoke. From time to time, she shook her head firmly, and scribbled notes that she passed to Fred Weedon and Ellsworth Connelly.
    Paul spoke like an automaton, showing virtually no emotion as he described a scene right out of hell.
    “Bob and Ruth put Rolf on a sheet and dragged his body to Ruth’s bathroom. Bob put Rolf in the bathtub and cut him up with a butcher knife and a broad-axe—and possibly a saw. And when she brought those, he shut the door and pushed her out of there.
    “He butchered Rolf’s body, cut it up in pieces and [Ruth and Bob] carried the pieces out to the back [behind the barn] in a wheelbarrow to a burning barrel. They burned the body parts with wood until there was nothing but ashes, and dumped the ashes in the cow manure.”
    Ruth had been concerned that the burn barrel itself might contain some residue, so it was cut into quarters and, with the body of a still-born calf, taken to the dump.
    At this point, Ruth had told Paul that he had become an accessory to murder.
    And so, five years, three months, and sixteen days after Rolf Neslund completely vanished, the story that everyone in San Juan County had whispered and wondered about had come to a gruesome and ugly climax.
    That is, if Paul Myers was to be believed.
    Some of the jurors said later that they had not found Paul Myers credible. “I don’t know if he was drunk on thestand,” one woman said, “but he talked so much about the alcohol he had put away.”
    On cross-examination, Fred Weedon had no trouble getting Paul to admit that he was drinking a half gallon of whiskey a day during his visits to Alec Bay.
    “It sounds like you were drunk up here all the time?”
    “Practically,” Paul agreed. “Seven to eleven in the morning was about the only time I wasn’t drunk.”
    “Does alcohol affect your memory?”
    “I believe it does—but I was so shocked at what I overheard that it’s indelibly marked in my memory.”
    And Paul’s recital of Rolf Neslund’s death was almost identical to Joy Stroup’s.
    It now became indelibly marked in the memory of all who heard it.

Nineteen
    People in the San Juans could hardly be blamed for talking about what was happening in the courtroom as the testimony became more and more shocking. Early on, court administrators had realized that the ferry ride to Friday Harbor and back to the home islands of jurors could very well be fraught with problems. The jurors were relegated to a particular section of the ferry decks, marked by tape, where they could not overhear comments by other passengers. At times, they felt almost ostracized.
    Since they were not segregated, jurors could go to lunch on their own, and they did, in pairs or small groups. Two female jurors were in a restaurant when they heard a county politician from across the room as he commented loudly about trial testimony.
    “We walked over and introduced ourselves as jurors,” one of the women said, “and asked him to speak more softly. He was annoyed, but at least he lowered his voice so we couldn’t hear his opinions.”
    Four weeks after Ruth’s trial began, the prosecution was winding down. Earlier, the jury had heard Ray Clever, Greg Doss, and Joe Caputo describe the long search of 1982. What they found meshed with Paul Myers’s statement about what he had overheard as he sipped whiskey in