Murder in the Stacks: Penn State, Betsy Aardsma, and the Killer Who Got Away Read online

  Murder in the Stacks

  Penn State, Betsy Aardsma, and the Killer Who Got Away

  David DeKok

  Copyright © 2014 by David DeKok

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Project Editor: Lauren Brancato

  Layout Artist: Adam Caporiccio

  Map: Alena Joy Pearce © Morris Book Publishing, LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeKok, David.

  Murder in the stacks : Penn State, Betsy Aardsma, and the killer who

  got away / David DeKok.

  pages cm

  Summary: “The book weaves together the events, culture, and

  attitudes of the late 1960s, memorializing the stabbing death of Betsy

  Aardsma in the stacks of Pattee Library at Penn State University’s main

  campus in State College and her time and place in history”-- Provided by

  publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-8087-7 (paperback)

  1. Aardsma, Betsy Ruth, 1947-1969. 2. Haefner, Richard Charles,

  1943-2002. 3. Murder--Pennsylvania--State College--History. 4.

  Murder--Investigation--Pennsylvania--State College. 5. Pennsylvania

  State University. Libraries. 6. Campus violence--Pennsylvania--State

  College. I. Title.

  HV6534.S68D45 2014

  364.152’3092--dc23

  [B]

  2014015185

  eISBN 978-1-4930-1389-0

  Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man’s life.

  —Daniel Webster, 18301

  Penn State University campus in 1969.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part I: The Murder

  Chapter 1: The Library in Happy Valley

  Chapter 2: Somebody Had Better Help That Girl

  Chapter 3: The Long Night

  Chapter 4: Trying for a Do-Over

  Chapter 5: Miss Marple Arrives at the Library

  Chapter 6: Bringing Her Home

  Part II: Searching for the Killer

  Chapter 7: The Running Man in the Core

  Chapter 8: Hypnosis

  Chapter 9: Frustration on the Road

  Chapter 10: Dragnet

  Chapter 11: Trouble in Old Main

  Chapter 12: Here Sits Death

  Chapter 13: Sleep Mode

  Part III: The Good Girl and the World Outside

  Chapter 14: Betsy Who Dreamed

  Chapter 15: Way Station to the World

  Chapter 16: A Desirable Young Woman

  Chapter 17: In the Shadow of a Killer

  Chapter 18: Making the Best of Things

  Chapter 19: Dangerous Attraction

  Chapter 20: Murder

  Chapter 21: The Night Visitor

  Part IV: Flight from Justice

  Chapter 22: Bad Seed

  Chapter 23: Death Valley

  Chapter 24: Left Behind

  Chapter 25: Hiding in Plain Sight

  Chapter 26: Downfall

  Chapter 27: Kill Me the Way You Killed Her

  Chapter 28: Miscarriage of Justice

  Chapter 29: The Philadelphia Lawyer

  Chapter 30: Penn State Drops the Ball

  Part V: Monster

  Chapter 31: Revenge

  Chapter 32: Paranoid and Agitated

  Chapter 33: Suing His Own Lawyer

  Chapter 34: Thinking about Ted Bundy

  Chapter 35: A Life Destroyed

  Chapter 36: Neighborhood Menace

  Chapter 37: Hole in the Desert

  Chapter 38: The Road to Rick Haefner

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Introduction

  This is not a tidy true crime narrative of the sort in which a murder occurs, the police labor to solve it, and the murderer is tried and punished. The stabbing death of twenty-two-year-old Betsy Ruth Aardsma of Holland, Michigan, in Pattee Library of Penn State University on November 28, 1969, went unsolved for more than forty years, and remains officially so as of this writing. But the identity of who killed her is no mystery. Indeed, I have written a dual biography of the victim and her killer, revealing who they were, how they came together, and why the murder went unsolved for so long. Their fateful encounter in the library had long seemed like a collision at a dark intersection between an innocent and a drunk driver. But in truth, it was far less random than that.

  There was nothing in Betsy Aardsma’s life that marked her for murder. She graduated near the top of her high school class and was full of the spirit of the 1960s—an early feminist, a woman with a yearning to help the less fortunate. She was among the best of her generation. Her killer, on the other hand, while extremely intelligent and book-smart, was a dangerous pedophile with a violent temper that could be triggered by a woman doing something that threatened or annoyed him. Both were graduate students at Penn State and from striving middle-class families.

  This story begins in State College, Pennsylvania, the home of Penn State, and makes stops in Holland; at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; in Chicago; in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and in the Death Valley region of southern California and Nevada. All of the names in the book are real, although a couple are shortened to just the first name. I came to this story because Betsy Aardsma was from my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and went to my high school, graduating six years before me. I didn’t know her, but I remember well when her murder was front-page news in the Holland Evening Sentinel. The hauntingly beautiful portrait of her that ran with those stories and for years thereafter accented the horror. It was a murder that seemed to make no sense whatsoever, standing out even in a year, 1969, when brutal and bizarre murders, such as those committed by the Manson Family, seized the headlines.

  Nearly all Penn State graduates since 1969 have heard about the girl who was killed in the library—it quickly became a campus legend—but few know more than a couple of details of what happened, which are often wrong. The failure to apprehend Betsy Aardsma’s killer would have consequences for many innocent people. One thinks of the phone call to the state police that could have been made by more than one person at Penn State University and weeps for the victims.

  No murder should go unsolved. No murderer should go unpunished. The Pennsylvania State Police tried mightily to solve this terrible crime, but in the end, it was citizens who cracked the case.

  Part I: The Murder

  That place was a jungle up there. The way it was situated, just everything.

  —Sergeant George H. Keibler, Pennsylvania State Police2

  Chapter 1

  The Library in Happy Valley

  It was a university library but also
a dark alley, a place of dread.

  Pattee Library on Penn State University’s main campus in the community of State College was mammoth, overwhelming, and confusing to newcomers, as important libraries often are. But it was also scary, which most are not. Scary because of the crime inside that nobody—neither the university administration nor the undermanned and ill-trained Campus Patrol—seemed able or willing to do much about. The year 1969 had included bomb threats, arson, and sexual assaults, and W. Carl Jackson, the director of libraries, worried that something terrible was about to happen.1

  It was nothing anyone on the outside might have expected in a small town and university nearly universally described, without conscious irony, as Happy Valley. Penn State had almost 26,000 students on its main campus in 1969, just about all of them white. Once known for little more than the study of agriculture, mining, and engineering, the university had made great strides in the liberal arts since World War II. English professor Harrison T. Meserole, for example, was the principal bibliographer of the Modern Language Association, which put him in the upper ranks of worldwide literary scholarship. You could do far worse than to complete your undergraduate or graduate studies in State College, whether in English or most anything else. Under President Eric A. Walker, Penn State had completed a massive building program between 1959 and 1969, had met all the enrollment targets set by the board of trustees, and would soon do away with its historical quotas for women students.

  The town of State College seemed to jump straight from an Archie comic book; rarely was a town more aptly named. It never had much raison d’être apart from the university. Less a real community than a collection of classroom buildings surrounded by postwar housing developments, if you went looking for “historic” State College, you wouldn’t find much.2

  A longtime joke was that Penn State, which had become the state’s largest and most prominent public university, was equally inaccessible from all parts of the state. Indeed, students in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Erie, or Scranton, the four urban corners of the state, could look forward in 1969 to hours of travel, much of it over two-lane highways, before arriving in Centre County, in roughly the geographic center of Pennsylvania. The region north of Penn State was so forested, mountainous, and thinly populated that in 1967, Columbia Gas Co. advanced a serious proposal to use an underground nuclear explosion to carve out a storage cavern for natural gas. It would have been near where Route 144 crosses the Clinton County line, about twenty-seven miles due north of State College.3

  Most who did their four years at Penn State, in what was once described as “a village lost in the mountains,” ever after called it Happy Valley.4 They reveled in the glory of the football team, the Nittany Lions, who were coming off an unbeaten season in 1968 under Coach Joe Paterno, and were already 9-0 in the fall of ’69. And they loved student life. They could go a little wild in the bars on College Avenue and depend on the grace of the university and the State College borough authorities not to get in too much trouble.

  Yet Happy Valley was an outlier in Centre County, a modern, scholarly island in a very white, traditionally conservative and rural sea. The rest of the county viewed the university with suspicion, if not thinly disguised hostility. Penn State was not multiracial in the modern sense, but did have a few minorities, very few, which most of Centre County in 1969 did not. They were different worlds with different ways. Happy Valley often felt besieged, both by politically and socially conservative members of the Legislature in Harrisburg, and by the very different world that began at the boundary of State College.

  But, from the outside, everything in Happy Valley looked rosy. Pattee Library crowned a gentle hill at the upper end of the Mall, a picturesque walkway lined by stately elm trees that the university went to great trouble and expense to protect from the blight that killed most American elms elsewhere. The Mall began at College Avenue downtown and continued gently uphill, past old and stately academic buildings bearing the names of long-forgotten professors or, in one instance, of steel magnate and über-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Even on November 28, 1969, with the leaves gone and winter fast approaching, it was a beautiful walk.

  Pattee Library5 had been built in stages beginning in 1937. The main floor of the library held its large and busy card catalog—endless drawers of index cards bearing the names and locations of books—along with study rooms and attentive librarians. Unlike many large libraries, however, Pattee’s stacks, which occupied two floors beneath the main floor and five above it, were open, and had been so since the summer of 1964.6 This meant students were not required to ask a librarian to retrieve a particular book for them. Instead, they looked up the call number in the card catalog, then went to a small door near the circulation desk and descended narrow stairs more suited to a lighthouse than a library. At the bottom was the gloomy underworld of the stacks, a claustrophobic, dimly lit maze of seven-foot-tall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves separated by aisles too narrow for two people to pass without one turning sideways. It was easy to get lost. The crazy layout was a result of pasting the 1953 addition onto the original 1937 building, without ever truly rationalizing the combination. The 1937 stacks, which had no windows, became known as the Core.7 No librarians were stationed here, nor were there any security cameras, which were available even in 1969. There was no regular sweep of the stacks, even at closing time. Carole L. Stoltz, a senior from Flint, Michigan, spent a lot of time studying down in the stacks, and dozed off one night during the fall of 1969. When she awoke, the building was dark. The librarians had turned off the lights and gone home at midnight.8

  Because people tended to be quiet in libraries, it was not unusual in the stacks to be startled by a fellow student materializing with the scary abruptness of a spectral figure in a carnival funhouse. It was also quite possible to be unaware of someone on the opposite side of a row of books, just inches away. Here and there, one might stumble upon a student in one of the carrels on the periphery of the Core. Carrel, like stacks, was another odd word from the library lexicon. It referred to an individual desk, a mini cubicle, really, with back and side walls rising up from the table and a half-shelf about eighteen inches above the writing surface.9 They were highly coveted and assigned to individual graduate students, who all but lived in them at certain times of the year.

  Students complained about Pattee’s inadequacies, and library director W. Carl Jackson did not disagree. The library had a small staff, much smaller than similar university libraries across the country, and its holdings were not all located in the main building. Some were in specialty branch libraries scattered across the campus; for example, in the Earth and Mineral Sciences Library in the Deike Building.10 It was fine if you knew you needed something at one of these distant biblio-outposts, but annoying if you discovered that fact while in Pattee and now faced a hike across campus or a long wait for it to be retrieved. Pattee held about 1.3 million books in 1969, which might sound like a lot but made it only the fourth-largest library in Pennsylvania. Nationwide that year, it was far down a list topped by the Library of Congress, with 14.8 million books, and Harvard University, with 8 million. Among state university libraries, the University of Michigan had nearly twice as many books as Penn State, 3.4 million.11 Jackson would sometimes boast that in 1956, Pattee Library had ranked only 50th in the nation in terms of holdings, but was now “in the mid-30s.”12

  Yet, despite Happy Valley’s remote location, the outside world was closing in fast. Neither the university nor Pattee Library had escaped the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. The Vietnam War had, by the beginning of 1969, killed nearly thirty thousand American soldiers and nearly half a million Vietnamese troops on both sides, plus an uncounted number of Vietnamese civilians in a conflict that seemed pointless and endless. Male college students could still get military draft deferments, but these were about to end. Republican president Richard M. Nixon, who took office at the beginning of 1969, had persuaded Congress to replace the
old method, in which local draft boards had the last word on who would serve, with a national lottery and no college deferments. Nearly every American campus had a dedicated corps of antiwar student activists who were outraged at the carnage committed in their name in Indochina, and who feared they would soon be asked to take part. Penn State’s aggressive chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, and its faculty advisor, Wells Keddie, marched and conducted sit-ins against the war, against Dow Chemical (maker of napalm) or military recruiting, or in support of black students at Penn State.

  Race relations at Penn State in 1969 were a major problem. The university was nearly all white. There were just under three hundred black students, some of them foreign, amid nearly twenty-six thousand whites. The 1970 federal census would show Pennsylvania to be 8.6 percent black, which, one could argue, should have resulted in at least 2,236 black students at the state’s largest public university. Penn State’s excuse was that it could find few qualified black high school graduates in the state. After Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, who became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, delivered a civil rights speech in Schwab Auditorium at Penn State on March 8, 1969, black students implored him to help, asking what he thought of a state university in the liberal North with so few black students. Could not the SCLC help here? University students had demonstrated against casual, everyday racism in State College since at least 1960, when a barbershop that refused to serve blacks (there was no black barbershop) was picketed. Later, there were protests against university tolerance of State College landlords who specified racial preferences in ads for student tenants. It had become clear to black activists on campus, as well as their white supporters inside and outside SDS, that at a northern university, bringing about change would be up to them.13

  Pattee Library soon became caught up in the struggle. In the summer of 1969, Penn State began work on a $4.75 million (more than $29 million in modern dollars) addition, called a “research library,” to the east end of Pattee Library. A ground-breaking ceremony on July 5 drew noisy and mainly white protesters from SDS, led by their president, Jeffrey Berger, a bus driver’s son from New York City. They held placards proclaiming more blacks, not books, and decrying $4.75 million for books, none for blacks. One protester yelled, “How about some black students to read those books?” Carl Jackson spoke to the demonstrators afterward and thanked them for their generally orderly behavior—they hadn’t become violent, after all. President Eric A. Walker and most members of the Penn State board of trustees, on the other hand, were not amused. Work continued on the research library as if nothing had happened.14