No Regrets

serve as pilot for the
Bahia Magdalena.
    “It was Rolf’s old ship,” McCurdy recalled. “It had a comparatively small rudder and it was a little hard to control. I was taking it up the Duwamish that night to the gypsum mill, the same route that Rolf had piloted in 1978. I heard on my car radio that Ruth Neslund had died in prison. I had a strong feeling that Rolf’s hand was on my shoulder that night.”
    Indeed, Rolf Neslund’s spirit may still visit ships at sea or coming into dicey harbors; it would seem natural for a man who spent most of his life at sea, saving many lives and shepherding ships into port. And even today, there are some who live in the San Juan Islands who believe that Rolf Neslund did not die in “Shangri-La” at all, but managed to escape from his wife to live out his days in relative peace in the homeland he loved and returned to visit so many times.
    Today, of course, if he should still be alive, he would be 106 years old. That he lived beyond the age of eighty in some Valhalla in Norway is possible, but hardly likely. Most people believe as I do that Rolf died in seconds, shot twice in the head by a woman who wanted him gone forever, so that she could have all his money and property, and that his body was, indeed, dissected into manageable pieces and burned to ashes. Ruth outlived him by thirteen years. Whether either of them occasionally returnsto haunt the eight acres on Alec Bay that they once treasured is a question no one can answer.
    Their story has been consigned to the lore of the islands, seeming, somehow, to be fiction.
    But it is fact.
    Were it not for the relentless detective work of men like Ray Clever, Joe Caputo, Greg Doss, Perry Mortensen, Sheriff Ray Sheffer, and Bob Keppel, and the superior prosecutorial work of Charlie Silverman and Greg Canova, Ruth Neslund probably would never have been arrested, much less convicted. Fortunately, they never gave up.
    No one who lived in the San Juan Islands in the 1980s has forgotten the Neslund case. Evidence from the trial is on display at the Historical Society in Friday Harbor— even including the bath mat near the tub where Rolf was allegedly dissected.
    On a Saturday night in October 2003, seventeen years after Ruth was convicted, many of those involved in the trial had a reunion. The
“State of Washington
v.
Nettie Ruth Neslund
—Revisited” function was held in the San Juan Island Courthouse, with a reception following at the San Juan Historical Museum, where attendees could view the “Law and Disorder” exhibit there.
    Since island dwellers who were interested were also invited, more than a hundred people showed up. The panel discussion in the courthouse included attorneys, deputy sheriffs, and jurors who were involved in the investigation and trial of Ruth Neslund. The original twelve-member jury had shrunk in the interim. Four of them had died and one had moved far away to Georgia.
    Many of the half dozen jurors who attended had lingering questions about some of the facts of the case that had not come out in court. Charlie Silverman led them through the Neslund case once more, this time more able to answer their questions than he had been during the weeks of trial. They had never known much about Ruth’s background before she came to Lopez. And that was as it should be in a murder trial.
    Ray Clever repeated his opinion that “Ruth was without a doubt the most evil ‘bad guy’ I’ve ever dealt with in my thirty-five-year career. They were nasty people—we called Ruth’s brother Bob ‘Butcher Bob.’”
    Clever spoke of the forensic techniques that revealed the many bloodstains in the Neslunds’ home, and Juror Dick Saler told the rapt audience, “The forensic stuff was so critical.”
    Clever explained to the crowd how close Ruth and her brother had come to being caught twenty-three years earlier. The investigator had eventually learned that Bob Myers had passed sections of Rolf Neslund’s body out the bathroom window, and used nearly a cord of wood to fuel the fire in the burn barrel as he cremated his brother-in-law. Then the burn barrel was loaded into Bob Myers’s pickup truck to be disposed of. However, as Bob was pulling out of the Neslund driveway, a sheriff’s car drove past.
    “This scared him,” Clever said, “so he took the burn barrel up into the woods and buried it. We never did find it.”
    Those who were brave enough studied the trial artifacts on display at the Historical Society,