No Regrets

that.
    As for Paul Myers, Weedon denigrated his effectiveness as a witness. “He’s a self-confessed drunk,” Ruth’s attorney said, a man with a blurred memory and a fogged-over grasp of reality. And Winnie Stafford—why hadn’t she heard any sound in the house where Robert Myers was allegedly cutting up a body? “Imagine if you can, the sound of a broad-axe chopping up a body in a bathtub.”
    And why wasn’t the fiberglass tub scratched or dented from the axe? Weedon declared Paul’s testimony unbelievable.
    Her attorney stood close to Ruth, his hand protectively on her shoulder, as he once more acknowledged that she wasn’t any angel. Yes, she, too, had a problem with alcohol, and she and her husband had been dealing with a marriage in trouble. But it hadn’t always been like that. Once, they had been happy, and Ruth had been “a person who took care of his [Rolf’s] every whim, his every need.”
    Fred Weedon had spent years representing Ruth Neslund, his neighbor when he spent time at his family’s vacation home, a woman he seemed to sincerely believe to be innocent. He was emotional as he spoke of her travail, and the tears in his eyes appeared to be genuine.
    Ruth Neslund was not a client any defense attorney might long for, but Weedon had worked very hard to show the jurors the other side of this case. What a travesty, he suggested, it would be if she was found guilty while Rolfmight turn up somewhere . . . someday. He painted her as a humble and pitiable figure. Her bowed head and her clasped hands did make her look somehow innocent.
    Ruth was only sixty-five, but she had aged a great deal in the prior five and a half years—either from stress or from alcohol. More likely a combination of both. She had dangerously high blood pressure, and she walked with a painful limp from her broken hip. But her life had been good recently. She loved her bed-and-breakfast, and her new life.
    Would she spend her last years in prison? Or would the jurors find that there was not enough evidence to convict her?
    On rebuttal, Greg Canova scoffed at the lack of marks on the Neslunds’ bathtub. “Bob Myers was not a strong man,” he said. “He wasn’t swinging from his heels when he wielded that broad-axe. Can you imagine how long it took Bob Myers to do this terribly, terribly, gruesome thing?”
    Up to this point, Washington State had never had a guilty verdict in a homicide trial where there was no body. There were many who believed it was impossible to convince any jury to rule for conviction in such a case.
    But it was almost time for these jurors to wrestle with the two views of Ruth Neslund that had been presented to them. No one in the gallery envied them that task.
    Now the fifteen jurors needed to be winnowed down to twelve. There had been no need to replace any juror during the long trial, no one got sick or had family emergencies, and all fifteen had listened to the testimony and remarks. Court clerk Mary Jean Cahail drew three names at random, and those people were dismissed.
    The dozen who remained left the courtroom and JudgeBibb spoke to the attorneys. “I don’t often compliment attorneys” he said, “because if you do it too often, I find it diminishes the effect. But I’m going to do it in this case.”
    He admitted that he had probably “snarled” at all four of them—Greg Canova, Charlie Silverman, Fred Weedon, and Ellsworth Connelly—at one time or another during the tense trial, but none of them “had lost their cool.” Bibb said they deserved to be commended for that.
    It was late. Just as the sun set far into the evening on the August night Rolf Neslund probably died, the reverse was true in winter. The sun disappears prematurely in the Northwest in mid-December, and it was pitch dark outside the courthouse on Wednesday night, December 11, when they finished final arguements.
    The jurors would not begin deliberating until the next morning. They would be sequestered during those deliberations. In a day, it would be Friday, the thirteenth, hardly a propitious date for someone hoping to be found innocent.
    Perhaps it would not take that long. Some said the jury would be back before noon on Thursday. A jury that returns rapidly usually means a guilty verdict. The longer they debate, the brighter things look for an acquittal. Ruth Neslund’s jurors had four choices to consider: innocent; guilty of first-degree (premeditated) murder; guilty of second-degree (not premeditated)