Historylink.org notes that 30 years ago, the Freighter Chavez rammed West Seattle Bridge.

At 2:38 a.m. on June 11, 1978, the freighter Chavez rammed the West Seattle Bridge over the Duwamish West Waterway, thereby closing it to automobile traffic for the next six years.

The Chavez was 550 feet long and carrying 20,000 tons of gypsum under the command of 80-year-old Puget Sound Pilot Rolf Neslund (1897-1980) and its master, Mojko Gospodnetic, when, just before dawn, it struck the east end of the bridge.

A Coast Guard board of inquiry found both officers negligent. Neslund retired two weeks after the accident. Gospodnetic, a Yugoslav national, was fired.

The website notes that Neslund met a grisly end.

On Aug. 8, 1980, Ruth Neslund (1920-1993) shoots her 83-year-old husband, Rolf Neslund (1897-1980), twice in the head after a violent argument over his purloined retirement fund.

With the assistance of her older brother, she disposes of the body by chopping it up with a butcher knife and an ax, incinerating the pieces in a burn-barrel and dumping the ashes in a pile of manure in back of their Lopez Island home.

After colleagues report Rolf Neslund missing, the San Juan County Sheriff's Department opens a missing-persons investigation, eventually charging Ruth, in March 1983, with murdering her husband.

In October 1985, Ruth Neslund will finally stand trial in San Juan County Superior Court and, after a month of testimony, be found guilty of premeditated murder. The judge sentences Ruth to life in prison, where she will die of natural causes in February 1993.