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

by David DeKok

  Surprisingly, there was often a Penn State University presence as well. Lauren A. Wright, a professor of geology at Penn State and chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, taught geology of North America and did his research in Death Valley during the fall term nearly every year. Shoshone was his base of operations, and he would often bring along a graduate student. During the fall terms of 1967 and 1968, he was accompanied by Richard C. Haefner, who went by Rick, a strange, distant young man from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who wore khaki pants every day and, as Wright observed out of curiosity, often carried a homemade knife.

  Chapter 8

  Hypnosis

  Soon after Betsy’s murder was discovered, the state police had begun contacting and questioning every student they could find who had been in Pattee Library on Friday afternoon. These included forty-six who had checked out books in the hour before she was found on the floor and as many students as could be identified among the six hundred who passed by the checker’s desks during that hour but did not actually leave with books. The latter task was difficult, since these patrons were identifiable only if the librarian happened to know and remember them or if they came forward on their own. Reports had been received of a male student leaving one of Pattee Library’s two exits in a hurry sometime between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. on Friday. Another young man had been seen running away from the library around that time. Was either one of them the killer? Maybe. But ultimately, the tips led nowhere. Betty Arnold, one of the Pattee librarians, remembers a state trooper telling her, “We’ll be lucky to ever find out who did this.”1

  The not-so-secret video cameras in the stacks also yielded nothing, or at least no footage of the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. Albert Dunning, news director of WDFM Radio at Penn State, took Kimmel aside after one of the news conferences early that week and asked him if they had gotten any leads off the videotape. The lieutenant froze, and Dunning said, “Well, it’s really not very well concealed.”

  Around that time, W. Carl Jackson, director of libraries, and Charles H. Ness, assistant director of public services, went down to the Level 2 Core and were picked up on the very same video camera. When a Campus Patrol officer viewed the tape, he was certain they were the two men being sought for questioning by the state police. “They came back!” he exclaimed. “The sons of bitches have come back!” Lieutenant Kimmel himself became briefly excited when he viewed another tape and saw that a young man whom he had spotted in an earlier tape had returned to the Level 2 Core. His height and general description seemed close to that of the running man. The student lived out in Boalsburg and was brought in for questioning. But he had an airtight alibi. “It wasn’t him,” Keibler said.2

  They also questioned students assigned to study carrels around the Level 2 Core. This raised alarm among foreign graduate students, who had a number of the carrels there. According to Dante Scalzi, then director of the Office of International Student Affairs, the international students believed they were being singled out for suspicion. Many of them spent hours in the library daily. The attention from the police left them shaken, especially those who came from countries where the police did not have a good reputation and were widely mistrusted by the citizenry. Many foreign students were there on scholarships or assistantships from Penn State or had some sort of financial support from their home government, all of which made them feel vulnerable.3

  Whether it was overly tough questioning or not, it led to the first break in the case. Joao Uafinda, the student from Mozambique who had followed the running man around the Core before losing him and going home, either had a carrel himself or was told about the questioning by someone who did. He came forward nine days after the murder and identified himself to the state police. Uafinda spoke freely about what he had seen and done in the Core that day, but he was vague on key points and nervous when Keibler questioned him. A look at his background explains why.4

  In 1969, his home country of Mozambique was in its 471st year of benighted colonial rule by Portugal and wracked by revolution. Some two hundred thousand white Portuguese had long exercised dominion over seven million blacks without any noticeable concern for their welfare beyond their utility as near slaves, creating wealth for Lisbon.

  Uafinda was the youngest of five children of a poor farmer and did not begin school until about age twelve, when the missionary friars of the Italy-based Capuchin order saw potential and plucked him from his family to raise and educate. They hoped he would become a priest. Even so, his prospects were bleak.

  Blacks had no political rights and could be arrested by the feared Portuguese secret police, the International Police for the Defense of the State (PIDE), as traitors if they criticized their racist treatment. They were subject to arrest and torture if they tried to leave the country, for higher education or anything else. To Uafinda, police officers meant danger, even death.

  When the revolution against Portuguese rule began in the fall of 1964, he was in seminary. A supporter of independence, he fled his homeland after a political crackdown. Over the Christmas holiday in 1964, Uafinda took a bus as close to the border with Malawi as he dared. Then he crossed over, probably through the bush on foot, and made his way to the US consulate in Blantyre. He told American officials that he wanted to go to the United States for a university education and become a physician.

  Uafinda arrived at the University of Rochester on a full scholarship from the US government in May 1965. An intake form said he arrived with an interpreter. “He [Uafinda] was well dressed—seemed somewhat timid, but fairly at ease. He will need to be put in [an] English language course immediately.” Uafinda stayed at Rochester for two years, studying geography and English—medicine had fallen by the wayside—before transferring to Penn State in the summer of 1967.5

  And now he was living in downtown State College, taking geography classes at Penn State and facing the stern detectives of the Pennsylvania State Police. He must have wondered if they were anything like the PIDE and would torture him. Uafinda gave them the benefit of the doubt, as his American friends encouraged him to do, but the language barrier remained an obstacle. He was not perfectly conversant in English, and his police interrogators were never quite sure if he fully understood what they were asking him.

  Sergeant Keibler interviewed Uafinda several times and took him back to the Level 2 Core, but he remained maddeningly vague about what he had seen. Keibler finally went to Scalzi and requested his help, asking him to take Uafinda to the Core and ask the questions he wanted asked. Scalzi said he would. When he returned, he told Keibler that Uafinda was nervous around police because in Mozambique, a police officer meant danger. He did not trust the state police, even though he had been told that in America it was different and the policeman was his friend. Scalzi decided that Uafinda was not holding anything back; he simply didn’t have the answers Keibler was seeking.6

  His other witness, Marilee Erdely, was a problem in her own way. On the surface, she was a perfectly pleasant, pretty, blonde twenty-three-year-old from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. She had a classic western Pennsylvania childhood, the kind seen in the films The Deer Hunter or All the Right Moves. Her father, Edward, was a steelworker, a machinist at the giant Aliquippa Works of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation along the Ohio River. Her mother, Mary, was a homemaker. The family had strong Slavic roots, even if her parents had changed the family name from Erdelyi, which was always being mispronounced as Erdley-eye, to Erdely, which people tended to guess right.7

  Marilee, an honor student at Hopewell High School, wanted to be a high school English teacher. She spent her freshman year at Edinboro State College, then transferred to Geneva College, a conservative Christian school in Beaver Falls, for her sophomore and junior years. She didn’t get to State College until the summer of 1967 but received her degree in secondary education from Penn State in the spring of 1968. After taking a year off, she began working on her master’s degree in Eng
lish, with an emphasis in English literature, which she probably hoped would make it easier for her to land a good teaching job.8

  But she had behaved oddly on the day of Betsy’s murder, and Keibler didn’t know what to make of her. He couldn’t understand why she had “flaked out,” as he put it, upon discovering Betsy Aardsma’s body in Pattee Library. “The strange thing about Erdely is, she’s up there, she’s a grad student. She’s in Betsy’s class. She knows her,” Keibler said. “When she goes into the Core area, the noise has occurred, and lying on the ground is Betsy. [Erdely] goes completely ape. As a matter of fact, when they [ambulance attendants] came downstairs, they thought she was the victim. It’s a puzzle in my mind why she reacted that way.” He mentioned how Dr. Reed found her almost in a trance, aimlessly rooting through Betsy’s purse in the waiting area at the Ritenhour Health Center. Keibler shook his head. James L. Severs, who married Erdely years after the murder, said his wife believed that for a time, the state police suspected her of having something to do with Betsy’s death. So there matters stood. Erdely was questioned as extensively as Uafinda, but her answers were incomplete or lacked clarity.9

  Lieutenant Kimmel hoped to obtain enough information to create a verbal description and composite sketch of the running man. What he got from Uafinda, Erdely, and a third man, another student in the English 501 class who Keibler, the protector of secrets, would not identify to the public, was barely enough for the verbal description. A week after the initial press conference, Kimmel told reporters that the running man was in his early twenties, approximately six feet tall, weighed 185 to 200 pounds, had short, light brown hair, and might have been wearing glasses. As far as clothing, he was wearing khaki work pants, a lightweight sport jacket, and light-colored sneakers.10

  Because the three witnesses were frustratingly vague on some details, creating a composite sketch was a problem. These sketches were rarely, if ever, done freehand by a trained artist. Rather, the state police relied on a kit that resembled a Mr. Potato Head game, albeit with human features. “They were very basic,” Trooper Mike Simmers said. “You plug a nose in, and plug a hairpiece, and then take a picture of it or get someone to do a drawing of it.”

  His description perhaps oversimplifies the process. The person providing the description first looked at a series of transparencies with different hairdos, different sideburns, different noses, and so forth. Then the matching features were added to the plastic head. The kit was intended to make it possible for any police department to draw a composite sketch, even if they had no sketch artist. The problem was that the kit sent up from Troop G headquarters dated from the 1930s, with hats and hairstyles from that era. Given that it was 1969 and men’s hairstyles had changed dramatically, Kimmel realized he had a problem. He arranged to borrow a newer version from the State College Borough Police that apparently had never been used.11

  The two composite sketches ultimately released to the public blended information received during the initial interrogations of Uafinda, Erdely, and the third English 501 student. Descriptions received from people who had seen a young man running outside of Pattee Library shortly after the murder occurred were also thrown into the mix. The reason for two composites was that the witnesses couldn’t agree on whether the suspect was wearing eyeglasses, but they were also slightly different in other ways. In the eyeglasses sketch, the figure has slightly more hair, and it’s combed in a different style. But they were intended to be the same person, the running man in the Core.

  Keibler considered the composite sketches to be “general, neutral composite” sketches that would fit a lot of suspects. Indeed, it was not hard to imagine that David L. Wright, Betsy’s boyfriend, resembled the sketch without eyeglasses, even though he had been in Hershey, dissecting a cadaver, at the time she was murdered. Keibler never placed much stock in the composites and said they did not play a significant role in the investigation. Their release to the media was an accident, he said, because they were not yet ready to go. But they were never publicly recalled by the state police, either.12

  It was Lieutenant Kimmel’s idea to bring in a hypnotist, hoping that in so doing he could extract more details about the running man from the minds of the two principal witnesses at that time, Uafinda and Erdely. Hypnosis could reach into the unconscious brain where seven-eighths of memories are stored, including disturbing or “unsafe” memories a person had suppressed. “This is why witnesses to very traumatic crime situations, such as homicides, are often unable to recall what they have seen,” wrote Vernon J. Geberth, a New York City detective sergeant, in his 1983 book, Practical Homicide Investigation. “Hypnosis has been used to enable people to recall names, places, or details including the actual verbalizations which took place during the crime.”13

  There are downsides to hypnosis, Geberth wrote. People can lie under hypnosis. Recollections may be colored by past experiences, or the mind of the person under hypnosis may fill in memory gaps with imagined or distorted information. He recommended that any information obtained through hypnosis be independently corroborated.14 What it all boiled down to was that although hypnosis could occasionally pry information out of the minds of witnesses, it wasn’t a magical mental truth serum. There were also legal risks. Hypnosis was an accepted investigative tool in 1969, but only barely, and there were still judges who believed it could implant false memories. Hypnosis proponents had cheered the ruling in Harding v. Maryland, issued in 1968 by the Maryland Court of Appeals, which ruled for the first time that the testimony of a witness to a crime obtained through hypnosis could not be excluded from trial per se. The defense could challenge the credibility of the hypnosis-aided testimony but not its general admissibility. This ruling was soon adopted by other federal and state courts. Keibler worried about tainting the prosecution of whomever they arrested for Betsy’s murder, but went along with Kimmel’s plan. Neither Erdely nor Uafinda had witnessed the actual murder, he reasoned, only the immediate aftermath, so the risk was less.15

  Kimmel asked Colonel Pelton if he knew of any qualified hypnotists. Pelton knew of a dentist in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Dr. Phillip T. Domin, whom the university had used once in a noncriminal matter. Domin had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania dentistry school in Philadelphia. He was a strong champion of hypnosis to relieve pain and stress in the dental chair, but also during chemotherapy, menstrual cramps, and any number of other uncomfortable situations. He once hypnotized an injured man in the field for painless transport to a hospital. And now Domin would try to help the witnesses relax themselves into a state where they might be able to identify Betsy Aardsma’s killer. Pelton obtained permission from Penn State administrators to pay Domin’s fee and fly him from Hazleton to State College in the university airplane.16

  Plans were made to have Domin hypnotize Uafinda, Erdely, and the second rape victim abducted from the Nittany Mall just a few months earlier, who agreed to be hypnotized so long as it was done by a professional. Brode’s theory of the country rapist coming to Pattee was still alive more than a week into the investigation. Keibler said the first Mall rape victim was off-limits for hypnosis because she was studying to become a psychiatrist, and her own analyst had forbidden her to undergo hypnosis.

  The hypnosis was conducted in a room in the Boucke Building that was wired for sound so state troopers and Campus Patrol officers could listen in on the session. Inside, it was just Domin and Uafinda, and after he put the Mozambique student into a trance, he began asking the questions Keibler wanted answered. Under hypnosis, Uafinda told Domin far more than he had told Keibler or Scalzi in his previous interviews. He was able to confidently remember the height of the man running out of the Core, estimate his age, and describe how he was dressed, which gave them more confidence in the information they had obtained from Erdely and the other English 501 student.17

  Erdely’s first hypnosis session was a failure, although it did yield some squad-room humor. Trooper Mike Simmers, the young crimina
l investigator who had been the first state trooper to respond to the murder, had been sent out by Sergeant Keibler to locate a student they wanted to interview. As he was leaving the Boucke Building, he passed an attractive blonde in the hallway. Their eyes met briefly as they checked each other out. Simmers didn’t think anything of it and didn’t know she was Marilee Erdely.

  He returned later to the Boucke Building and went to the war room. Keibler was smoking his pipe. Simmers asked how the hypnosis session went with Erdely. “Great,” Keibler answered. “We got a real good composite sketch of the guy.” Simmers, excited, asked if that meant the running man would be identified, and Keibler responded, “No doubt in our mind. In fact, you know him.” He handed Simmers the sketch and watched the young trooper’s face as he realized the sketch looked exactly like him. “Can you explain yourself, Simmers?” he said, trying not to laugh. Mortified, the young trooper explained what had happened. Dr. Domin, still in the room, theorized that since Erdely had gone into the hypnosis session right after eyeing up Simmers, her memory of him overrode her memories of the Core. The other troopers erupted in laughter.18

  Erdely was brought back for a second hypnosis session and did better. She was able to recall in greater detail some of the things she saw that day, including the running man and the chase by Uafinda. But Keibler still considered her a puzzle. It was nothing he could put his finger on, but there was something about her that troubled him. The second rape victim added detail to what she had told Brode after she was assaulted in the fall but was not able to identify her assailant or contribute in any way to the Aardsma investigation. Brode’s theory continued to be a wild goose chase. Kimmel released the final composite sketches to the press, even though Keibler was not really satisfied with any of them.19