No Regrets

author for three decades. Although he had never met Ruth before her trial, Keith took out advertisements in local papers after the guilty verdict to announce that he was writing a book that would tell the “real truth” about Ruth.
    Keith had tape-recorded the entire trial, and he managed to get an interview with Ruth while she was out on bail. In it, she referred lovingly to “The Captain,” and explained her rather unusual banking methods as the only way she had left to prevent “The Captain” from frittering away all of their savings. She spoke about her brother, Robert, just as fondly—but blamed her brother, Paul, for lying about her just to get the reward the Puget Sound pilots were offering. As for Winnie Kay Stafford, Ruth said her testimony was just plain perjury.
    Gordon Keith had what he considered a scoop, but his belief in Ruth’s innocence really caught fire when he had a private reading with a psychic named Dr. Richard Ireland who had just given two lectures on Orcas Island. GordonKeith was bedazzled by Ireland, the only person beyond Ruth herself who seemed to agree with his theories.
    Ireland had been photographed with celebrities, including Mae West and Daryl Zanuck, and had once appeared on an early Steve Allen show. When the psychic told Gordon Keith that he could not visualize Rolf Neslund as dead, and, indeed, felt he was hiding near palm trees—not in Tucson or San Diego, but in Phoenix, Arizona—another bizarre chapter of the Neslund saga opened.
    Although Richard Ireland claimed to know nothing of the case, he told Keith in 1988:
    The only compelling or shocking evidence is to reverse the whole situation by simply turning up with the man in his physical body. Then what can they say? I think this would cause a lot of red faces and, as a result, I imagine a lot of individuals will be unemployed.
    Putting the judge and the prosecuting attorney in the spotlight is going to be quite embarrassing to a lot of people, including jurors and witnesses. And the way to accomplish this is to turn up with his body. I think he can be found. I think some brilliant young detective should go looking for him now.
    That’s what I’d do. I think she’s going to get out of prison, because I feel as though Rolf Neslund is still in his body, and I think he can be found. That’s your key. He’s been seen by certain people who know he’s alive, so follow the trail.
    But, of course, the “trail” had been followed and followed and followed by a lot of brilliant young detectives.
    Galvanized, Gordon Keith sent manuscript queries to several Northwest newspapers and television stations.
    He was enraged and incredulous when he got either slight interest or no response at all. Keith then started his own newspaper, in which he could print his theories about Ruth’s innocence. He apparently had no copy editor and his articles were rife with misspelled words, and although he decried the way justice had been done—or not done— he gave no specifics to prove Ruth innocent. Keith was aghast that no one believed Ruth’s answers to his questions in his “exclusive interview” with her, but they were just versions of what she had said so often. And only he believed in Dr. Richard Ireland’s visions.
    Gordon Keith died before he ever completed a manuscript about the Neslund case and Ruth’s innocence. Dr. Richard Ireland is also dead, and cannot be reached to explain his condemnation of the state’s case against Ruth and his visions of Rolf Neslund alive and well among palm trees.
    Fred Weedon has never expanded on the remark he made to Joe Caputo at the coffee machine on the third floor of the courthouse. He might have been serious, or he might have been joking. Ray Clever had a somewhat similar exchange with Weedon in which Ruth’s one-time attorney hinted that she had confessed to Rolf Neslund’s murder.
    Captain Richard McCurdy, the current president of the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association, was living in Europe when the
Chavez
hit the West Seattle Bridge, but he heard that story and about Rolf’s disappearance from the older pilots like Captains Bill Henshaw and Gunnar Olsborg.He never knew Rolf Neslund personally, but McCurdy was to have a kind of connection with him.
    The
Chavez
had started out life as the
Pacific Carrier,
and then she became the
Chavez,
only to be rechristened the
Bahia Magdalena
after her bridge damages were repaired. On the afternoon of February 17, 1993, Mc-Curdy was headed to