No Regrets

both times. Interestingly, he recalled the location of his bloodletting was in Ruth’s bathroom, and along the hallway where the search warrant team had isolated blood the state said was Rolf’s.
    In a surprise move, the defense called Elinor Ekenes! She seemed an unlikely witness for Ruth’s side, but she had to respond to a subpoena to appear. At first, she recalled, Rolf had made jokes about the ship accident and he hadn’t considered it a tragedy at all. It was his relationship with Ruth that made him “very unhappy.”
    Elinor acknowledged that Rolf had spoken about his will when she talked to him on July 27, 1980. He wantedto change it. “He said, ‘I want you and the boys to get whatever I have left.’”
    She also said that Rolf had been afraid of how he might die, and that he asked her to see that he had an autopsy to determine the cause if he passed away.
    It was doubtful that Elinor helped the defense.

Twenty-one
    If possible, the courtroom was even more jammed with spectators than it had been earlier. On December 6, 1985, Ruth Neslund herself emerged from the elevator to encounter a gaggle of television cameras and reporters. Her son, Butch Daniels, was there from Louisiana to help her, and her attorneys flanked her protectively. She turned away from the microphones held out in the hope that she would give some memorable quote, and made her way slowly to the courtroom, leaning heavily on her four-footed steel cane. Her hair, a mixture of stark white and iron gray was straight and cut in a short, mannish style now, parted on the side. Her clothing was quite suitable for a heavy-set woman of sixty-five. She still wore the dark blue polyester slack suit that had become familiar to the gallery. She had changed only her blouses—from ruffled white to prints. Sometimes, she added a scarf, and she did on this day.
    Facing the possibility of life in prison if she failed to convince her jurors of her innocence, Ruth seemed confident. At times, she was very serious and, when it seemed appropriate, she used a little humor.
    She had told reporters a few days earlier that she “could hardly wait” to take the stand, and laughingly teased them by saying they should have followed her to the bathroomwith their cameras. She seemed almost to enjoy being the center of attention.
    Now, as she faced the gallery and its rows of acquaintances and strangers who seemed to lean forward in anticipation about what she had to say, Ruth Neslund stared back, her face arranged in an unfathomable mask.
    She would seldom waver in her answers to Fred Wee-don’s questions, although, when she did, it was usually about specific dates. Not facts.
    Once more, Ruth described the night when her husband had left her to go to Norway. She believed that he had arranged to join Elinor, the mother of his two sons. “He told me that she was going, and he was going, and I assumed they would go together or get together once they got there,” she testified. It was something that she had to accept, something she had feared for many years. She spoke now of the way their marriage had disintegrated after Rolf retired.
    “He was allowed to retire gracefully and could keep his papers without surrendering his license. After he retired, our relations changed considerably. Communications fell off substantially,” Ruth said. “He would not stay in the same room [with me], and he would go off by himself.”
    She recalled that she was frequently left alone in the few months prior to Rolf’s deserting her. “He would take trips to the mainland and be gone for days sometimes.”
    Asked about his state of mind, Ruth didn’t use the word depressed. But she had seen a change in him after the bridge incident. “He did a lot of daydreaming. He lost a lot of his whistle and sing,” she said. “His big concern was being sued over the bridge accident. He was afraid we would lose everything we had to the City of Seattle.”
    What they had enjoyed together during their twentyyears of marriage was gone, and she had accepted that. And with Rolf’s disintegration, their financial picture changed, too. She had always been in charge of their money, even before they were married. She estimated that about $120,000 had been “piddled away” during the first year of Rolf’s retirement. “Sometimes he threatened to take the money and put it in kroner.”
    Ruth said she had tried to loan money for the interest and to make investments to keep them from