No Regrets

bankruptcy. “He was very careless with money—he’d cram wads of it in his pockets—but he’d never take money directly from me. If I gave him a twenty, for instance, he wouldn’t take it from my hand. I would have to cash checks and put money in his dresser drawer.
    “He never wanted to be involved. He wouldn’t even know how to balance a checkbook.”
    Fred Weedon asked Ruth how Rolf got the money for his flight to Norway, and she answered easily. “He said he had plenty of money already in Norway. When I asked him how he got it there, he said it was none of my business.”
    Ruth Neslund and her attorney were characterizing her as a loyal, commonsense woman who had been at her wits’ end trying to save what she and her husband had worked many years to build. It was an effective stance. And now Weedon opened up the matter of excessive alcohol consumption in the Neslunds’ house of cards. There was no avoiding it, and it was wise of him to encourage her to talk about it, in hopes of defusing the state’s description of her probable alcoholism. Her own lawyer asked her to describe the exacerbation of her dependence upon drinking.
    She nodded sadly. Drinking had been a constant thingin their home. “We called it the house that beer built,” she said, “because we supplied a case of beer daily for those working on the house.” (That in itself might explain why Ruth’s workmen had so many accidents on the job . . .)
    “We did do heavy drinking and drank too much every day. It sharpened the resentments Rolf had. He felt pretty much cooped up after his retirement and that would come out. He would make us drinks and then say, ‘Drown yourself.’ That would antagonize me and I’d say, ‘You drown yourself.’ This would lead into stinking little arguments which would grow into physical fights—up to three or four a month. We’d get up the next morning and sometimes not even remember the fights, except we saw our broken glasses, our bruises, a broken tooth, a broken lamp. We’d get along great in the morning. It was like the fights never happened...”
    Ruth’s testimony was not unlike the self-revealing admissions often heard at AA meetings. With Weedon’s careful questioning, she was baring her soul. She said she hadn’t thought of herself as an alcoholic in the summer of 1980, but in retrospect, she thought she must have been. She had been blind to so many things that happened. She, Rolf, and most of their friends drank continually.
    Still, she recalled setting a limit for herself of three drinks a day. If she poured herself a fourth, she called it “a boomer,” and said that she never drank that one.
    Ruth wasn’t surprised that a lot of bloodstains were located in her house. She had long suffered from high blood pressure, and often had nosebleeds (a common side effect). Sometimes, she had saturated up to four hand towels before she could manage to stop the bleeding.
    Ruth had an even more elaborate explanation for how Type A Positive blood was found in the shower door frameof her bathroom. In yet another “household accident,” Rolf had cut his fingers on a table saw. He was bleeding profusely, and Ruth said she had tried to take him to a medical clinic. He refused to go until he had taken a shower. “I told him to hold his hand in the air to keep it from bleeding [in the shower].”
    There was the matter of Ruth’s strange comments at the Puget Sound Pilots’ party in January 1981. Why had Ruth said, “Rolf is in heaven”?
    “Oh,” she said with a faint smile, repeating a story she had told the sheriff. “I meant that to mean he was in Norway, because to my husband to be in Norway is to be in heaven! Never, by the wildest stretch of my imagination could I imagine Rolf being in God’s heaven. Never...”
    Whether she thought him too wicked to be in heaven or she was trying to say he wasn’t dead after all wasn’t clear.
    It had been six weeks since the first day of trial when Greg Canova rose to cross-examine Ruth Neslund. Canova was a handsome man in his thirties with black hair and a luxuriant mustache, charismatic in the courtroom. But Ruth viewed him suspiciously.
    She was dismissive and incredulous as the special prosecutor asked her about her alleged phone calls to her niece, Joy Stroup. Ruth said she had no recollection of those. When Canova asked her, “You don’t recall telling your niece that you wanted to waste Rolf?” Ruth replied, “I’ve never used that