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

  But civil rights and antiwar protests were not what gave Jackson sleepless nights. The most fragile of Happy Valley illusions in 1969 was that Pattee Library was safe, a temple of learning where students could go to find scholarly books without fear that the scary outside world would follow them inside. This was the murder year in America, a time of grotesque crimes against young Americans, and especially college women. What set 1969 apart was the shocking instances of serial and cult murders springing not from politics, but from some demonic miasma that had been stirred to life. The Zodiac Killer murdered at least five, and possibly as many as nine, young people in the San Francisco area between December 1968 and October 1969. The Manson Family committed the Tate–LaBianca murders, butchering eight people in Los Angeles on August 9–10,1969, and John Norman Collins murdered as many as six young women, most of them students, around the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti between July 1967 and July 1969, with most dying during the spring and summer of 1969. It was unprecedented and terrifying.

  Jackson’s fears might not have extended as far as a murder taking place inside Pattee Library, but he was facing growing security concerns. One of the first memos about security problems in Pattee Library was dated July 12, 1968, and addressed what to do about complaints from students concerning incidents in the stacks and reading rooms, “which, for lack of a better word, could be called ‘nuisances’ [emphasis in original].” The writer defined this as “problems of boisterous conduct or language and similar unusual situations” but did not elaborate on what the “unusual situations” might be. The library staff was reminded that the Campus Patrol was on twenty-four-hour call, would respond to these incidents, and that calling them would allow for quicker action and “help reduce the number of phone calls to department heads and supervisors during the evening and weekend hours.”15 But it was not so easy as that.

  The Campus Patrol and the auxiliary Student Patrol in 1969 were unarmed security guards, not “sworn” police officers, which meant they could detain suspects but not jail or prosecute them. “They were not a bona fide police department,” said Howard “Buzz” Triebold, who at the time worked with Colonel William B. Pelton, director of the Department of Security at Penn State. If a crime occurred on campus, they eventually had to call in the real police. But not the State College Borough Police, even though much of the campus was within the borough, and the local police could be on campus from their downtown station in two minutes. Instead, the Campus Patrol referred criminal matters to the state police at Rockview, who were headquartered a little over six miles from campus in the former warden’s house outside the state penitentiary, also called Rockview. It took them ten to fifteen minutes to get to campus, and they did not patrol there in any regular sense. No one today seems to have a solid explanation of how and why this bifurcated jurisdiction developed, though it might have been because, in terms of training and resources, the state police of that era were far better prepared than local police to investigate crime on the Penn State campus, not to mention the rest of rural Centre County.16

  That the Campus Patrol was unarmed was a consequence of state law and university policy. Officers had little formal training in police methods and procedures, unless they had gotten it somewhere else before joining the force. Campus Patrol officers tended to be middle-aged or older men, while the Student Patrol, which mainly provided traffic and crowd control at football games, were, as their name implied, students. Both patrols were under the jurisdiction of Colonel Pelton, a retired army officer who had once headed Penn State’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program. He was generally respected by the state police, if not by the SDS, who called him “Pig Pelton.” The problem was that Pelton was a rigid bureaucrat who resisted giving the library any special status when it came to security, despite the unique and mounting threats it faced.17

  Compounding the situation was the latitude Penn State gave to students—anyone on campus, really—who engaged in socially or sexually erratic behavior (political dissent was another matter). At the beginning of 1969, a library memo discussed staff concerns about a mentally ill student who spent a large amount of time in Pattee Library, even during term breaks, behaving in a “weird,” unpredictable manner that disturbed and worried some people. One staffer who interviewed him for a part-time job remembered the “far-out” look in his eyes, and that he appeared to be “high.” Others were concerned about his apparently rapid physical and mental deterioration. The memo writer commented that some guidance might help the young man, who appeared from all accounts to be intelligent. No one suggested barring him from Pattee Library.18

  Charles L. Hosler, dean of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences from 1965 to 1985, saw many examples of misbehavior at the university that went unpunished. “I think the spectrum of people in academia is a little broader than in society at large,” he said. “You have a lot of people who feel sheltered here. Their behavior would not be approved in the average country town. And there is a reluctance to punish anybody, or to turn anybody in. I saw it in many respects.”19

  Politics and protest compounded Jackson’s security problems in the library. The late winter and early spring of 1969 was a time of intense political conflict at Penn State, with black students and SDS members demanding greater black enrollment and greater student freedom, including the freedom to publish an SDS underground newspaper called the Garfield Thomas Water Tunnel. It was named after a testing facility of the navy’s Ordnance Research Laboratory at Penn State that had helped to develop the submarine-launched Polaris nuclear missile.20 Penn State president Walker, an admirer of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, tried to suppress the underground newspaper.21 Meanwhile, radical student activist Jerry Rubin gave a speech in support of the Penn State students on February 13, 1969, wrapping himself in a Vietcong battle flag. Five weeks later, Rubin and seven other left-wing activists, including Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden, were indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly crossing state lines to incite riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the previous summer.

  Yet other Penn State students, led by white fraternity members, were vocal in their support for Walker and President Nixon. During a seven-hour sit-in by 400 black and white students at Old Main, the university administration building, on February 24, 1969, an estimated 1,500 counterdemonstrators stood outside, heckling, some shouting, “Bring out the coons!” Several hundred students assembled at a field near Beaver Stadium to welcome President Nixon on March 6, 1969, when he arrived by helicopter with First Lady Pat Nixon to attend the funeral of his uncle, Ernest L. Nixon, a retired Penn State agriculture professor. Walker, who despised student protesters, supported a bill being considered in the Legislature in Harrisburg that would have sharply increased penalties for students who engaged in campus protests, whether violent and disruptive or peaceful.22

  Whether directly connected to the troubles on campus or not, Pattee Library became the target of repeated, anonymous bomb threats and at least two arson fires in March 1969. None of the bomb threats proved real, but they were troubling and disruptive to staff and students alike. The fires could have been catastrophic. On March 9, a blaze was set in a section of the stacks housing government documents; Penn State was a federal depository library and received copies of many government documents. Only a quick report of the fire by students, and the concrete floor slabs of the stacks, prevented the blaze from spreading to other floors. The arsonist struck again on March 13, first calling in three bomb threats and then setting another fire in the stacks that was found and extinguished by library employees. Additional small fires were set in April, but again were found and put out by the staff. The arsonist had sprayed lighter fluid onto books and set them ablaze.23

  As scary as they were, the bomb threats and fires were overshadowed by a more pervasive and disturbing problem in Pattee Library. The stacks were a haven for a variety of sexual activities
that the state police termed “vice.” They were a popular place for gay cruising, especially among gay teenagers who couldn’t get served at the My-Oh-My Bar downtown.24 And it wasn’t just teenagers; adult male gays, some of whom were teachers and professional men, traveled here from conservative small towns around the region, seeking sex in the safer confines of the library, where they were less likely to be recognized, beaten up, or arrested if caught. Gay sex was still against the law in 1969. Pattee’s stacks were intended for scholars, but anyone could go there for any reason. There was no gatekeeper to bar the door to those who came to satisfy their sexual urges.

  Not all of the sexual activity was consensual. Male flashers, masturbators, and gropers in the stacks were a continuing problem. Librarians might admonish anyone they caught but tried to avoid confrontations or being the sex police. Penn State administrators sent mixed signals on how far they were willing to go to clear out vice. That fall, Colonel Pelton had ordered the doors removed from the stalls in a men’s restroom near the Level 3 Core, hoping to deter their use for gay sex. But after a few days, higher officials in the Penn State administration ordered him to put them back in the name of privacy.25

  Director of Libraries Carl Jackson considered 1969 to have been an awful year, marred by an excessive number of incidents. There had been occasions of men exposing themselves to female students, engaging in voyeurism, and “otherwise molesting female students. . . . We have had excrement on stairways, have been concerned at gatherings of men students (and some who may not be students) who are suspected of engaging in acts of perversion in our basement areas and in the various men’s rooms in the library,” he wrote in a memo to Paul M. Althouse, vice president for resident instruction.26

  Jackson had seen the impact of the sex crimes on women students and was deeply frustrated and angry that he could not get a permanent Campus Patrol presence in the library. He had sat with shaking, weeping young women in his office, waiting for the Patrol to arrive. “When they finally get here,” he told Taft Wireback, a writer for Focus, a student-run magazine serving the Penn State campus, “the girl would be so upset that she couldn’t even remember what her assailant looked like. And, needless to say, there was no chance of apprehending the criminal.”27

  Pelton rejected Jackson’s request for a permanent Campus Patrol officer in the library. He argued that with a force of forty-five to fifty officers and 300 campus buildings to patrol, it was impossible to detail an officer only to Pattee. “Just as it is impossible to keep a full-time physician in every residence hall in the event of an emergency,” he told the Daily Collegian, “so it is also impossible to have a patrolman everywhere.” Robert Barnes, a retired state police trooper who worked under Pelton as director of investigations, told Wireback much the same, but without the attitude. “We were aware of the deviation in the library but had a manpower problem. [There were] times when the perpetrators were able to escape before we were able to to respond.”

  Jackson and Pelton had angry confrontations about increased library security, but the director of security would not back down. Finally, after the fires in March, Jackson used library funds to hire two part-time security guards, one of whom patrolled the library, and especially the stacks, every night from 8:00 p.m. until midnight, when the building closed. That left twelve hours, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., without any security presence, but it was the best he could do with the money he could wring from his budget in an especially tight year. The increased surveillance resulted in several men being caught in sexual acts. “To our surprise, many were not students, but family men,” Jackson told Wireback.28

  Pelton presided over the Safety Council, a monthly meeting of departmental representatives at which safety problems of any sort could be addressed. At the beginning of the 1969–70 school year, the Safety Council arranged for fifteen thousand copies of a pamphlet, “Women Alone: Target for Trouble,” to be printed and distributed to female students. But more-typical problems addressed by the Council, including at the November 19,1969, meeting, ranged from traffic hazards to the fire danger posed by unattended hot plates, immersion coils, and coffeemakers. Much time was spent on the hot-plate issue, with talk of an ad hoc committee being appointed to make recommendations for reform.29

  During the last week of November in 1969, the Pattee sexual deviants were unusually busy. On Monday, November 24, a man exposed himself to a young woman in the Level 3 stacks. Another coed was accosted by an exhibitionist on the following evening. He ran when she screamed for help and was not caught. Later that evening, a third young woman looking for a book in the Level 5 stacks rounded a corner and was shocked to see a man masturbating in the dimly lit aisle, between two rows of bookshelves. He was “playing with himself,” she told librarians.30

  Sergeant George H. Keibler, the chief criminal investigator for the state police barracks at Rockview, who would dwell on the events of November 28, 1969, for the rest of his life, minced no words about the Pattee Library stacks. “It was a den of iniquity down there,” he said.31

  Chapter 2

  Somebody Had Better Help That Girl

  At five minutes before five o’clock on November 28, 1969, Marilee Erdely, a pretty, blonde graduate student with blue eyes and a porcelain complexion, leaned against a wall just outside the Level 2 Core in the basement stacks of Pattee Library. She was flipping through a book she had just pulled off a shelf.1

  Erdely, who was twenty-three years old, had come to Penn State from the steel and football town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, where her father was one of thousands of workers at the massive Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation mill along the Ohio River.2 She had majored in secondary education as an undergraduate and was now pursuing a graduate degree in English. She had gone to the stacks to find a book to complete a term paper for English 501, Research Materials and Methods, a class taught by Professor Harrison T. Meserole and Nicholas Joukovsky, a new and young assistant professor recently arrived from Oxford University. In the class, which was a boot camp for first-year English graduate students, they learned how to conduct proper research and write like scholars. Meserole had assigned them a critical study of a manuscript of their choice, either from the Pattee Library’s own Rare Books Room, or one of the photocopies he had made of manuscripts from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, which collected literary and other works from colonial times up through 1876.

  A decidedly portly man—everyone remembered him that way—Meserole was an authority on early American literature and the editor of an important anthology in the field. But in the rarefied world of literary scholarship, he was best known as the principal bibliographer for the Modern Language Association, founded in 1883 to promote the study and teaching of language and literature all over the world. There were few better teachers to introduce a graduate student of English to literary scholarship, and if he seemed like a terror, well, what were drill sergeants at boot camp for if not terror?3

  Erdely had run into several of her classmates in the stacks that Friday afternoon, all working on their own papers. Just a few minutes earlier, she had spotted Betsy Aardsma, a pretty brunette from Michigan, moving among the bookshelves, and had chatted with her briefly. They had two classes together, English 501 and English 434, Movements in American Literature. The latter class was a recently instituted African-American literature course taught by Professor Charles T. Davis, a pioneer in the field.4 Where Erdely stood flipping through her book, the lighting wasn’t so bad, but that wasn’t so in other parts of the stacks, especially in the Core. The lights in each row were controlled by individual switches and not from a central panel and were often turned off for one reason or another.

  Pattee Library was by no means deserted on the day after Thanksgiving, even if visitors were down by about a third because of the holiday weekend. Those who remained on campus, especially the graduate and foreign students, found the library a logical place to go on a slow
day.5 One of them was Joao Uafinda, twenty-nine years old, and one of the rare black students at Penn State. He was far from home, a refugee from the war of independence against Portugal then raging in his home country of Mozambique in southern Africa. Uafinda was short, just five-foot-five, and had close-cropped hair and a handsome, friendly face. He was walking toward Erdely but had not quite reached her.6 Perhaps thirty feet away, fifty-two-year-old writer Richard Sanders Allen had just finished making copies at a coin-operated Xerox machine. He was visiting his son Robert that weekend, and was killing time until his son got out of class. (Penn State expected professors to hold classes on Black Friday, even though it was an unofficial holiday for much of the nation, and some actually did.) Allen, who lived near Saratoga Springs, New York, was an engineering historian who wrote for American Heritage magazine and was an authority on covered bridges. His latest book, Covered Bridges of the Middle West, was due out in about a month.7 He put the copies in his briefcase and began walking toward Erdely, intending to go up a nearby staircase that led to the main floor. Allen did not know Erdely or Uafinda, but the lives of all three were about to intersect and change forever.8