No Regrets

defense expected to begin after the long holiday weekend. They didn’t make that time limit, but they weren’t far off the mark. Now the big question was: Will Ruth take the witness stand? She had indicated even before her trial that she was anxious to tell her story, and she was confident that the jurors and everyone else would see that she had been falsely accused.
    But it’s a rule of thumb among defense lawyers in cases involving criminal violence that the appearance of the defendant on the witness stand is almost always bad news. Some may come across as too confident or cocky, others may irritate jurors, and some may give away too much information. Once a murder defendant testifies, he (or she) opens himself up to cross-examination by the prosecution and to questions that defense attorneys’ wiser judgment never want to be asked.
    No matter what Fred Weedon or Ellsworth Connelly advised, those who knew Ruth Neslund felt she would do as she pleased. She trusted Weedon and she had leaned on him for years, but she was a stubborn woman who, in the end, made her own decisions.
    Fred Weedon answered all the questions that had been posed earlier on Monday, December 2, as he made hisopening statements. He laid out his case for the jurors, and he exuded confidence as he did so. If he had tried to dissuade Ruth from testifying, he gave no indication. Instead, he said she would testify, and she “would welcome the opportunity to speak after years and years of island gossip.”
    Not only would the defendant give the jury the true story of her last night with her husband, Weedon promised to present witnesses who had seen Rolf Neslund after he was alleged to have vanished.
    There would be testimony from people who had observed that Rolf was so depressed after the bridge accident two years earlier that he had spoken of suicide. “He was an eighty-year-old man who was getting forgetful, an eighty-year-old man who was increasingly concerned about his own mortality,” Weedon reminded the jurors.
    Hadn’t Elinor Ekenes testified that she had dinner with Rolf on August 5, 1980, and that she had advised him to “run away to Norway”? Weedon portrayed Rolf as “a man torn between two loves,” a situation that must have only contributed to his depression.
    “I do not stand here to try to put a halo over Ruth’s head,” Weedon said easily. “It’s not going to fit.” Ruth was an admitted heavy drinker and her marriage to Rolf had become storm-tossed and angry. Yes, they had an argument on August 8. And, yes, Ruth had called her niece in Ohio. But Weedon insisted that Ruth and Rolf had made up after that call, and then they had sat down to dinner together.
    And, yes, Ruth had transferred close to one hundred thousand dollars from their joint accounts into accounts in her name only. But that was only wise business sense. “She wanted to avoid possible losses that might come from the bridge accident.”
    A successful lawsuit could have wiped the Neslunds out financially.
    The blood found in the house was just as easy to explain, Fred Weedon pointed out. During their fights, the Neslunds had drawn blood. Moreover, there had been accidents during the time that Ruth and those she hired built the house in 1976-78.
    As for the .38-caliber revolver that the state dubbed the murder weapon, Weedon promised to present witnesses who would stipulate that that gun wasn’t even purchased until December 1980—four months after the alleged murder date.
    Weedon’s opening remarks were compelling. He was describing the case from the other side of the looking glass, and it was riveting to hear his “What if?” arguments that demanded jurors and court-watchers consider that Ruth Neslund might be a totally innocent woman who had been widowed through no fault of her own.
    From where Fred Weedon sat, Ruth wasn’t perfect, but she had done what she could—allegedly at Rolf’s instigation to protect their retirement money. And Rolf—far from being the content retired man—was, instead, a suicidal, depressed, fading image of the robust man of his youth.
    And then, Weedon suggested, Rolf would have suffered a crushing blow to learn that Elinor would not be waiting for him in Norway, but on her honeymoon with another man. Would that not have been enough to make an old man take his own life?
    Perhaps. But the defense position on the blood evidence was hard to believe. It was difficult to envision that much blood flung, spattered,