No Regrets

money when he discovered that he had no access to any joint bank accounts. Ruth told Winnie Kay that she had to put their money into her accounts because she fully expected Rolf to take it all with him when he left for Norway with Elinor. She couldn’t let him leave her penniless after all her years of managing their money so carefully—not when he deserted her for another woman.
    When Winnie Kay Stafford’s long-awaited testimony was reported in news bulletins, John Saul added a caustic stanza to his endless limerick.
    When Winnie came down to the Inn
    Friend Ruth had committed a sin.
    Ruth then she did urge her
    Her honor to perjure,
    And offered Miz Stafford more gin!
    Called to testify again on rebuttal, Ruth strongly denied that she had ever said any of the things Winnie Kay testified to. It was all lies. Winnie Kay was making it all up.
    •  •  •
    The trial was virtually over, and it was time for final arguments. Between them, Greg Canova and Fred Weedon would speak for four and a half hours.
    Greg Canova went first. He knew that the concept of a murder without a body seemed strange to laymen, and he explained once again that it was not necessary to show photographs of Rolf Neslund’s corpse to prove that he was, indeed, deceased. “All that was left of him [that was found] was blood on the concrete, and parts of his blood on the ceiling and on the gun that was used to kill him. Ruth Neslund must be held accountable for killing Rolf Neslund.”
    The defense forensic expert had said that parts of Rolf might remain somewhere and suggested they hadn’t all burned to ashes. Canova reminded the jury that the state had never claimed that Neslund’s body parts had totally evaporated. What mattered was that they had never been found. The testimony from so many friends and relatives whom Ruth had confided in was far more compelling than finding the body parts. She had told numerous people how she got rid of Rolf’s remains. Ruth had been unable to contain herself, and admitted to bloody murder many times, giving macabre details, particularly when she had enough to drink to lower her guard and loosen her tongue.
    That the murder had occurred wasn’t surprising. Canova commented that it had only been a matter of time before Ruth and Rolf—one or the other—would kill. They were deadly adversaries with “incredible animosity bubbling to the surface all the time.” That had become the norm for them.
    “What happened on August 8, 1980, was that it all exploded.”
    Canova deemed the defense’s attempt to offer Ruth’s nosebleeds and minor accidents as excuses for blood remaining in the house unconvincing. “Isn’t it amazing how every aspect of this case that seems to have physical evidence happens to have been destroyed, or cleaned, or ‘can’t be traced’?”
    There were numerous discrepancies, Canova pointed out, in Ruth’s stories. For instance, Ruth had testified that she found Rolf’s Lincoln Continental on the Anacortes ferry dock “a week or two after” Rolf left her “on August 14.”
    But the bills from the classified ads and her own phone records showed that she advertised his beloved car for sale on August 13 and 14. “The reason the ad was running was because she had the car at home,” Canova said. “She knew exactly where it was. The car was never driven anywhere by Rolf after August 8.”
    Greg Canova found Ruth’s statements, testimony, and the ensuing contradictions those of a woman “who knew exactly what she was saying when she was trying to cover her tracks. She just tried too hard and she got caught at it.”
    Over all, there was “compelling” evidence that Ruth had shot and killed her husband on August 8, five years earlier, and then helped her brother chop up and burn his remains. “Taken together, all the physical evidence is overwhelming beyond a reasonable doubt that Rolf was killed and Ruth killed him.”
    Fred Weedon’s final arguments stressed that there was no reason to believe that Rolf Neslund was really dead. “Just because Rolf hasn’t been seen since 1980, that’s no reason to believe he’s dead,” Weedon said.
    Perhaps, Weedon suggested, he had decided to start life over somewhere far away from Lopez Island, or he might have killed himself in a state of depression. Weedon told the jurors that Ruth was not obligated to prove what had happened to Rolf. He had been depressed, and Weedon reminded them of the witnesses he had called to establish