by David DeKok
Martha sat up with him nights and helped him go over the lecture material and talk about it. But Durgy was on a downward spiral and reached the point where he simply could not teach. He went to see Dr. Henry Sams, the chairman of the English Department, whom Martha Durgy called “a wonderful man.” Sams granted him sick-leave status. Once that was out of the way, Durgy packed up the car and returned to Ann Arbor with his family, leaving many of their belongings behind in the Bellefonte house. It was right around Thanksgiving. Martha Durgy is said to remember that it was November 27, recalling that they missed their Thanksgiving dinner because they were on the road.18
If that had been where Durgy’s part in this story ended, it is doubtful he would have become a person of interest to the police. He saw a psychiatrist in Ann Arbor upon his return, but on December 19, Durgy got in his car and began driving north. It was three weeks to the day, almost to the hour, since Betsy Aardsma had been murdered. Assuming he started in Ann Arbor, he drove north on US Highway 23 for about nineteen miles, turning west onto Interstate 96, a freeway, at Brighton. He continued toward Lansing, the state capital, for another twenty-seven miles. It was 7:00 p.m. and dark, and he was traveling through farmland, but he might have seen the lights of a house about three hundred yards to the south just before he veered off the highway and crashed into the middle abutment of the Dietz Road overpass. Durgy died of his injuries the next morning at a Lansing hospital. Martha Durgy believes her husband committed suicide.19
That was not the only out-of-state trip made by Pennsylvania state troopers during the Aardsma investigation. Toward the end of the active phase of the probe, Keibler told Ken Silverman, a reporter for the Daily Collegian at Penn State, that he had sent investigators to Michigan, Washington, DC, New York, Indiana, West Virginia, Ohio, and even New Mexico. (Some of these may actually have been phone calls. Jan Sasamoto, who lived with her husband in Charleston, West Virginia, at the time Betsy was murdered, said she talked to a trooper over the phone, but that he never came to their house.20)
The trip to Washington, which is about two hundred miles south of State College, had to do with a mysterious postcard and Peggy Wich, one of Betsy’s closest friends. Wich lived in Washington for a time after graduating from Marquette University and worked as a waitress at a hotel near Dupont Circle. It was there, the day after her friend’s murder, that she chanced to wait on a customer who had the New York Daily News open to a picture of Betsy and a story about her death. Wich had mailed a letter to Betsy just before she died, dropping it in a public mailbox on Dupont Circle near the restaurant. Her letter, with the postmark identifying the station where it was processed, was now in police custody. So was a postcard to the state police from an anonymous writer that had been processed around the same time, at the same station. This postcard urged the detectives searching for Betsy’s killer to “Look for the guy in the work pants in the library.”21
Two Pennsylvania state troopers, accompanied by a DC Metro detective, came to Wich’s apartment. Had she mailed that second postcard? No. She knew nothing about it. How had Betsy met David? The usual answer. If one of Betsy’s friends had been involved in the drug business, would she have reported her? “I said no,” Wich recalled. “She would not have gotten involved. It would not have interested Betsy at all. Because we talked about that kind of stuff.”
Her roommates listened in fascination from the top of the stairs as the police questioned Wich. She convinced the troopers she had nothing to do with the anonymous postcard, despite it being posted from the same station, and they did not come back a second time. The question raised by the mysterious postcard remained: Who was the student in the library wearing work pants? Work pants, of course, is an indistinct term. The writer might have meant jeans or he might have meant khakis, but the anonymous author did not elaborate.22
Chapter 10
Dragnet
Nearly every morning that first month, the forty Pennsylvania state troopers involved in the Aardsma investigation assembled in Room 109 of the Boucke Building to receive their daily list of students or faculty members to interview. On the assignment sheet was the person’s name, where they allegedly were at the time of the murder, what they were allegedly doing, and where to find them, plus “just a little bit of background on the individual,” Trooper Carl Cseko said. Astonishingly, the state police interviewed at least two thousand students and an unknown number of faculty during those early weeks. Students were questioned because they were in the English 501 class or lived on Betsy’s floor in Atherton Hall, had been in Pattee Library that day, were friends of Betsy’s, or simply because someone thought there was an off chance they might know something.1 Often it was the Campus Patrol who tracked down the students wanted for questioning. Other times it was Trooper Simmers, a student himself, who would bring them back. From his undercover work on campus, he knew the lay of the land. Most of the troopers brought in from outside did not.2
As Lieutenant Kimmel already knew, the problem was that many students, though not all, viewed the state police on campus not from the perspective of besieged settlers welcoming the arrival of the US Cavalry, but more from the perspective of the Indians. Not all Penn State students saw the state police and Campus Patrol as the good guys. Leftist students in Happy Valley had numerous grievances stemming from crackdowns on civil rights and antiwar protests since 1965, and over freedom-of-expression issues. There was a vast gulf between these students and the police, which they found difficult to cross to report mere suspicions.
Trooper Simmers knew the tensions all too well. “They did not like the state police; they did not like authority,” he said. Much of his work on the Penn State campus up until now had been spent monitoring the SDS and a group he called the Coalition for Peace. His superiors did not always try to preserve his undercover status—for example, ordering him to be the one to make arrests. Then everyone knew who he was. “There was no love at all by the professors or the students for the state police. No respect at all,” Simmers said. Keibler agreed. “Some of us were probably looked at as pigs,” he said. But attitudes varied. The reluctance of students to talk to investigators seemed to depend on which academic department they were in, with art students being the hardest to interview. “I think art students in the university are a different breed of cats,” Keibler said.3
The Michigan State Police had faced similar problems during their investigation of the Coed Murders and had found no real solution. “The net result was that there were many college students who viewed the police as puppets for the government,” wrote Earl James, the Michigan state trooper who prepared the murder case against John Norman Collins. He blamed the problem on police having to do their jobs and facing the inevitable fallout of doing what was necessary to keep the peace and protect property. In the eyes of many students, that made them the mailed fist of the establishment, the same establishment that, if they were boys, wanted to cut their hair—no joke at the time—and send them off to fight in the hated Vietnam War. The late 1960s saw the first battles in the culture wars that would convulse America well into the twenty-first century. Students watched TV in the summer of 1968 and saw other students being beaten by helmeted police on the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. It should have come as no surprise that suddenly all police everywhere were potential pigs in their eyes.4
Things were not all bad for the state police investigating Betsy Aardsma’s murder. For all the detractors of the police, probably as many Penn State students retained an instinctive respect for law enforcement that was a legacy of their small-town upbringing. This was the campus, after all, that had turned out counter demonstrators to the Penn State SDS chapter in 1965 and 1969 and a non-ironic welcoming committee for President Nixon when he arrived on campus for his uncle’s funeral. Trooper Lee Fisher, part of the team of forty investigators, believed that most students gave information if they had it, even if they were upset by state police crackdowns on dissen
t.
But murders aren’t solved by limiting interviews to conventional, clean-cut students who respect the police. Keibler and his detectives needed to reach out to the angry half and hope that students who knew something would come forward, whether they were summond or not, whether they liked the state police or not.5
If there was any low-hanging fruit, it was likely to be found among students in the graduate English boot camp class, English 501, Materials and Methods of Research. Betsy Aardsma and Marilee Erdely had been in Pattee Library on November 28, working on term papers for the class. Linda Marsa, Betsy’s best friend at Penn State, was also in the class. So were fifty-seven other new graduate students in English, including a quiet young man from a farm north of Harrisburg, Larry Paul Maurer, who would soon attract police attention. Many of them, including Maurer, had been in the library that day. The state police made plans to question every one of them.
When English 501 next assembled in a lecture hall in the basement of the Willard Building, where it met, the mood was somber. Professor Harrison Meserole opened the class with consoling words and then explained why there were state police detectives in the room. They were here to ask questions about what each of them remembered about Betsy, he said, and whether they had any thoughts on who might have wanted to kill her. If they had seen anything suspicious in Pattee Library that day, they should mention that, too. The students were then divided into groups of six and taken away in turn to different rooms for individual questioning by the detectives. David R. Johnson, one of the students questioned, recalled being asked point blank if he was having an affair with Betsy.6
In the days to come, students speculated about who among their number could have been the killer. Their suspicion fell on one particular young man who was widely disliked for his loud, arrogant behavior in class, even while not being particularly smart. “I think there were some people who wanted him to be guilty just because they didn’t like him,” said Nicholas Joukovsky, who co-taught the class. He said this was not Maurer, whom he remembered as a very quiet young man.7
The state police would occasionally stop by Joukovsky’s office in the Burrowes Building to show him images gathered by the not-so-hidden video camera at the crime site. He never recognized any of the faces. Joukovsky sensed that the investigators had no solid leads. In addition, they seemed “incurious,” as he put it. He was surprised that they did not interview him in greater depth, given that he knew the members of his class better than anyone, except perhaps Professor Meserole. There was no follow-up interview—at least, not the sort of interview where an investigator or team of investigators bores into a subject to extract anything he might know. He reasoned that perhaps they were directing their most probing questions to Meserole, who was a full professor, after all, and eighteen years older than he was. Still, Joukovsky thought, wouldn’t it still make sense to talk to me anyway?8
The state police pressed their student informants on campus for anything they might know. Keibler and his men were especially interested in knowing what the drug dealers were saying. Given the times, it was inevitable that suspicions arose regarding a possible connection between Betsy’s death and drugs, with scenarios ranging from the possibility that she had come upon a sale in progress in the stacks to speculation the she had somehow run afoul of a drug dealer in some other way. Today, her friends find the idea that she was involved in the drug trade, either as a buyer or seller, to be laughable. But it was one of the ideas pursued by the police in that cold month after she was murdered. And, as with nearly every aspect of the case, there were tantalizing hints that perhaps, just maybe, this was the right trail.9
On the night of the murder, a young man from New Jersey, remembered only by his last name of Landis, had been found passed out in a dark corner on the first floor of Pattee Library. Keibler said he was a small-time drug dealer, peddling LSD on the Penn State campus. Whoever discovered him had removed his wallet and turned it over to a librarian, who either did not go to check or did not wake him up and tell him to leave. Nor did any of the police officers in the library investigating the murder that night notice him. Landis slept there until the next morning. The librarian turned over the wallet to the Campus Patrol. Around the middle of the following week, Robert Barnes, a former state trooper who was second in command to Colonel Pelton, contacted Keibler and told him what had happened. Barnes said the student had been “screwed up” that night, based on what the librarian told him.
Keibler went through the wallet, which among other things contained a list of safe houses for draft resisters and army deserters heading to the Canadian border. He passed the list along to army intelligence. Then he had Barnes summon Landis on the pretext of returning his wallet. “I got on him and interviewed him with Barnes present,” Keibler said. “He admits he was in the library upstairs, high on LSD. He didn’t even know there was a murder, and nobody ever [questioned] him. He was lying on the floor in a corner! Unbelievable.” After he extracted whatever information he could, Keibler ordered Landis (who was not a student) to leave the campus and never come back. Landis protested angrily, saying, “You can’t do that!” Keibler disagreed. “I’m just going to let the word out that you’re working for me. He said, ‘Well, they’ll kill me.’ And I said, ‘That’s your problem.’ And he left campus.” Keibler said the situation after the Aardsma murder was “just crazy as hell.”10
Then there was the case of the mysterious drug dealer from Philadelphia, one of a number of young men suspected by the state police of transporting drugs from the City of Brotherly Love for sale in Happy Valley. He was believed for a time to have been the running man followed by Uafinda shortly after the murder, and also the person seen running from the library and across the quad in front of Old Main minutes later. It later turned out he was in Philadelphia at the time. The incident passed into the lore of the Aardsma case, fated to be brought up by people who remembered bits and pieces of the story but not how the entire narrative played out.11
One of the weirder rumors on the Penn State campus was that Betsy and her mother and father had been drug agents for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and that her murder had been carried out by a professional hit man. The idea seems as preposterous today as it did in 1969. Her mother, for the record, was a college-educated homemaker, and her father, a college-educated tax auditor for the state of Michigan. Unless they led a True Lies sort of existence, with secret lives as crime fighters unknown to the people closest to them, this one can be dismissed. Keibler, who heard the rumors, certainly did. Tyger, who had gone to Michigan looking for dirt on Betsy, proclaimed her “clean as a whistle.” He and Milliron and Mutch were unable to find any links to drugs in her life. David L. Wright, her boyfriend, told one of his Hershey housemates that as far as he knew, she “wasn’t into drugs or anything like that.” Did she ever take a toke? Who can say.12
The state police did get tips from student informants, from the Campus Patrol, and from people walking in the door, calling on the telephone, or writing letters. These could be good, intriguing, silly, wrongheaded, or useless. But they all had to be checked out. Keibler believed you just never knew. “You had to get them out, because you can’t tell who’s crazy and who isn’t when you’re getting a tip like this,” he said. “If I would sit down and try to figure out how many diversions we had, it’s in the dozens.” He said that in any major case, “you’ll get stuff like this. It’s coming at you. You can expect it.”13
Consider, for example, the investigation of the so-called “vicious lesbian” who had supposedly attacked two or three people affiliated with the university. The Campus Patrol had been “working with” her, Keibler said, because she had a history of being sexually aggressive and very physical. Some of his detectives were tied up for a week investigating her. “Not that it was wrong to look, but then they realized that she wasn’t connected to this,” he said. “There’s a person who is physically afflicting her
views onto female students. Well, you have to get her out of it.”14
As far as homosexuality as an explanation for the murder, some of the state police investigators considered it possible that Betsy had been slain because she chanced upon some form of gay sex in the stacks at a time when it was still illegal under state law. “One of the biggest theories was [that] she walked in on a gay professor and a student going down on each other, [and that] one stabbed her and the other ran. A possibility,” said Trooper Simmers. Trooper Tyger, who considered the stacks to be “a hellhole,” also leaned toward this theory. So did Corporal Mutch, who found support for the interrupted-sex theory in the odd positioning of five chairs near the murder site. The back story to their theories, of course, was the discovery by Mary Willard of deposits of dried semen on the library floor, shelves, and on the books themselves. If gay sex was going on, might she not have surprised a man masturbating or performing oral sex on another man, or stroking himself while viewing pornography? They had found all that pornography stuffed in the shelves, after all, as well as the expensive Dutch pornography left in one of the carrels.15
A critical question is whether anyone she interrupted would have been scared of exposure to the point of committing murder. Trooper Kent Bernier, one of the later investigators (2005–09) assigned to the Aardsma case, disbelieved the interrupted-sex theory for that reason. He wondered why there were no other reports of gay violence in the library if that was what happened. “It’s covered in the report,” Bernier said, referring to the 1,800-page main report on the Aardsma murder that the state police keep locked away. He doesn’t believe that an interrupted tryst, especially at a relatively tolerant place like Penn State, would lead “to an unbelievably vicious murder.” Trooper Roger Smith, who studied the Aardsma case file in the 1990s, thought it was simply the wrong time of day (4:55 p.m.) for a sexual tryst to be taking place. Masturbation, though, might have occurred at any time.16