No Regrets

likely she would leave prison alive.
    But, for now, Ruth was still fighting. “I didn’t kill my husband. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t,” she said once more. She recalled that she and Rolf had their “ups and downs,” and that the latter had become more frequent. She admitted that she had been feeling sorry for herself, and that her last few years had been “what the young people call a real drag.”
    Pleading with Judge Bibb to find some way for her to go home, Ruth said, “I wouldn’t hurt Rolf, let alone kill him. Whether it’s twenty or thirty years, it’s not going to matter because I’m not going to last very long. You and I both know it.”
    Ruth went home on January 25. With the loyal support of eight San Juan County friends, who mortgaged their homes to raise the $150,000 security bond needed beforeshe could be released, she returned to the home she and Rolf had once called “Shangri-La.” While Fred Weedon appealed her sentence, she planned to return to running her bed-and-breakfast business.
    Ruth Neslund had numerous islanders who believed in her innocence, many of whom were well-respected citizens. One was Charlotte Paul Reese, the author. Reese was a former member of the Washington State Board of Prisons and Paroles, and a presidential appointee to the U.S. Board of Paroles. She wrote to Judge Bibb to ask that Ruth be granted a retrial, or at the very least that she be released on her own personal recognizance.
    Ruth could hold her head up high, reassured in the knowledge that influential people believed in her. She had always had a good grip on the English language, one that belied her lack of formal education, and she spoke to
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reporter Larry Lange in an interview in which she castigated those who she felt had unfairly seen her convicted of murder.
    She was very angry at Winnie Kay Stafford—who was despondent after she testified. She scoffed at the idea that Winnie Kay was competent enough to speak out against her in court. “If I have any feeling for her,” Ruth said, “it’s that she’s loused up her life pretty bad.”
    As for her brother Paul, Ruth said that he had made up his testimony based solely on “gossip” he’d heard in local bars. She said he did that in an effort to claim reward money from the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association for information about Rolf. She believed Paul had been paid by prosecutors and that he needed cash to support his craving for alcohol: “He has a thirty-dollar-a-day habit and a seven-dollar-a-day pension.”
    She gave Greg Canova short shrift, dubbing him “acannibalistic prosecutor who bases every question on a [false] premise. He can kill me but he can’t eat me.”
    Whatever that meant.
    Ruth Neslund had little respect for the jurors who found her guilty of murder, claiming that several members “had never made a decision in their lives other than buying a used washing machine.”
    She was convinced that at least one juror had relied on something heard outside the trial, and felt that she had been victimized by the fact that some jurors lived on islands in San Juan County other than Lopez. “Those people look down on Lopez,” she snorted, “as the ‘hick island’ in the group.” She added that “competition between islands is terrific!”
    How such competition might have made a difference in evidence in a murder trial was somewhat obscure. But Ruth Neslund hurried on, saying that she chose to treat her life as if everything was normal. She would continue to run the Alec Bay Inn, and wait for the hundreds of daffodil bulbs she had planted in her garden to bloom. She even invited the reporter to bring his wife and stay in her bed-and-breakfast.
    She smiled benevolently as she said, “I really don’t go around killing people!”
    Despite the guilty verdict, life went on virtually unchanged for Ruth Neslund. Business was brisk at the inn, and she was a gracious hostess to all who stayed there. Her civil suit against the Sheriff’s Department and the prosecutors—where she once sought $750,000 for alleged damage to her home during the 1983 search—was resolvedquietly. She and her attorneys settled, in January 1986, for $6,000.
    “We would have cleaned and repaired her house right after the search,” Ray Clever said, “but she ordered us off the property.”
    On February 12, 1987, Ruth’s other suit, the one against San Juan County, was dismissed.

Twenty-four
    Ruth Neslund was still free in midsummer