No Regrets

word. I wouldn’t know how to use it.”
    “You didn’t tell her that you just shot Rolf and he was burning in the burn barrel?”
    “I don’t remember that specific call. Why would I saythat? No, I didn’t. There was no reason to...You can shout that from the housetops, but it is not true.” And then she added, “I have relatives who would say anything you’d want to hear for forty dollars.”
    Ruth said she wasn’t necessarily referring to Joy, but that some of her relatives could be bought. She said she might have made some phone calls on August 8. “I was upset and hurting because I knew Rolf was leaving. I got into my cups during those days, too. I think I drank quite a lot when I knew he was going.”
    As for Donna Smith, Joy’s sister, Ruth was angry at her betrayal, but she didn’t remember any phone conversations or particular incidents.
    “Didn’t you, in fact, call her and tell her you were going to be sending her thirty pieces of silver, a reference to the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas for betraying Jesus?” Canova pressed.
    “No. I wouldn’t have said that because I don’t consider her a real Christian,” Ruth sniffed.
    Ruth herself wasn’t known for churchgoing; still, she took on a pious look.
    Even though Greg Canova pointed out that Ruth had given different testimony in many areas in earlier hearings, she remained unruffled—and gave new explanations.
    Now, after hearing Paul Myers testify against her about what he had heard her say regarding Rolf’s murder and the disposal of his body, Ruth deemed her brother “a pathological liar,” and a thief, a heavy drinker, whom she had rescued from his filthy living quarters and tried to rehabilitate on Lopez Island.
    But hadn’t she praised Paul earlier in earlier hearings?Canova asked. “You said you were closer to Paul than to your other brothers and sisters?”
    “I must say that I had mixed up pity for love,” she answered quickly.
    If she had given different testimony at the special inquiry hearing in 1981, in the areas Canova specified—and, indeed, she had—she explained that was because she had been “confused” at the time.
    Ruth Neslund was implacable on the witness stand. She had an explanation for everything, even though her reasoning and answers didn’t mesh with what she had said in the years just past, or with the physical evidence. She admitted only to being a too-trusting wife who was about to be abandoned, and to drinking too much in an effort to block out her emotional pain.
    As for murder? No one had ever found even a smidgen of Rolf’s body. He was alive when he left her, and for all she knew, he might still be alive someplace.
    And when Fred Weedon asked her the inevitable and burning question on redirect: “Did you shoot Rolf Neslund?” Ruth spoke clearly and emphatically.
    “I did not shoot Rolf.”
    Ruth’s son, Warren “Butch” Daniels, testified that his mother hadn’t even purchased the Smith & Wesson .38 that the prosecution said tested positive for blood until after the alleged murder. He insisted that it had been bought in December 1980—four months after Rolf Neslund disappeared. She had bought it from a gun shop in Slidell, Louisiana.
    On cross-examination, Canova suggested that it was not the Smith & Wesson she obtained that December and whose receipt was submitted as evidence by the defense,but the Colt Python that was also found in her dresser drawer.
    “Mr. Daniels, isn’t it correct that when your mother was there in 1980, the gun you gave her to take back to Seattle for her protection was, in fact, a Colt Python .357 Magnum, and this [Smith & Wesson] gun, this .38 caliber, was one you had given her on one of her earlier visits back in ’79?”
    “No.”
    Although Butch Daniels would not budge in his testimony, Judge Bibb later ruled that the gun receipt would be excluded from consideration by the jury.
    The final witness for the defense was called on Wednesday, December 11. Fred Weedon called the defense’s own criminalist, a “freelance” forensic scientist, Raymond Davis. Davis said he disagreed with the Washington State Patrol’s crime lab experts, and with Rod Englert. In his opinion, the splatters of blood drops on the ceilings of the Alec Bay home had not come from a gunshot. He told the jurors that the blood mist was “also consistent with medium-velocity cast-off blood,” saying it could have come from an instrument or weapon that administered a blow.