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

by David DeKok

  Paul M. Althouse, vice president for resident instruction, had just been designated Penn State’s contact point “relating to all matters dealing with the coed’s murder,” as an official memo put it, rather coldly. On December 3, Jackson appealed to Althouse for approval of the library’s proposal to hire more uniformed security for the indefinite future, insisting, “I have a legitimate concern for the safety and well-being of all members of the academic community, and particularly those working in or utilizing library facilities.” Jackson described the horrible year in Pattee Library, the arson fires, men committing sexual offenses against women, and “acts of perversion” (gay sex) in the stacks and restrooms, all backed up by the letters and memos Hooley had collected.8

  Jackson’s appeal was successful, and Penn State approved funds for a uniformed security guard to be stationed in Pattee Library at all times the building was open to the public, meaning 7:45 a.m. to midnight. Because the guard was not under the jurisdiction of the Campus Patrol, he was not subject to being called away from the library for traffic control or other assignments from Pelton or Barnes. Some students and faculty actually objected to the presence of the uniformed guard, but the number of incidents in Pattee Library dropped dramatically. As a further safety measure, reflective of an era when paternalism toward women was still tolerated, if not expected, female staffers were barred from working alone at night in the branch libraries and in sections of Pattee away from main corridors and lobbies. Jackson and Ness were not completely satisfied but acknowledged that the situation was better than before Betsy Aardsma was murdered. Of course, if Pelton and the Penn State administration had listened to Jackson earlier in the year, the tragic events of November 28, 1969, might well have been averted.9

  Four days after Betsy’s murder, Representative David S. Hayes (R-Erie) and nine cosponsors introduced a resolution, HR 161, calling for the appointment of three members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to investigate security at all of Pennsylvania’s state-owned or state-related (Penn State was in the latter category) colleges and universities. “The tragic death of Betsy Aardsma in the Pennsylvania State University Library raises a serious question as to the effectiveness of the security system of our colleges and universities. We must ensure that our children are as secure in their schools as they are at home,” Hayes wrote in the resolution. At twenty-nine, Hayes was one of the younger members of the Legislature. He wanted the investigators to have subpoena and contempt power. But his commonsense proposal went nowhere. HR 161 never made it out of the Rules Committee. Committee chairmen and the majority party leadership have great power over which bills see the light of day in Harrisburg, and lobbyists know it. Whether Penn State’s lobbyists had anything to do with that is impossible to determine at this juncture. The resolution received no known news coverage and only came to light because a copy turned up in the University Library Administration Documents in the Penn State Archives, meaning that some at the university knew of the resolution. Indeed, it is inconceivable that Penn State’s lobbyists did not immediately forward the measure to university president Eric Walker. What his position on Hayes’s proposed investigation might have been remains one of the mysteries of the Aardsma murder.

  The question of how much Penn State cooperated with the investigation has been much debated over the years, especially by the state police detectives who worked the first weeks of the Aardsma case. They remain deeply divided over whether the university fully cooperated with the Aardsma investigation. Interviewed at the end of his life, when he was dying of cancer, Lieutenant Kimmel said the university was “very, very” cooperative. “Well, of course, they should have been, but they were,” he said. “There was no question about cooperation.” Then Kimmel added, as if sensing the intent of the question, that the university was not the reason the case was never solved.10

  Sergeant Keibler said there was no official pressure from the university not to pursue certain angles that might bring scandal to Penn State. He did sense reluctance from faculty members to answer questions about other faculty members, which he believed was due in part to the sexual overtones of the murder. “Normal thing. Would happen today,” Keibler said. “But no, you can’t say we were blocked in any way with it. Did we get all the information that we would have liked to have had? Hell, no. But we got an awful lot that I can’t even talk about.” Keibler had a close working relationship with Colonel Pelton, the director of security who oversaw the Campus Patrol. Although he was critical of how Pelton handled the first ninety minutes of the investigation, when both the killer and any usable clues were lost, Keibler praised Pelton’s help and cooperation from that point forward. “There is nothing that happened in the Aardsma case that they knew or were working on that I didn’t know,” he said. He did not believe there could have been a credible suspect in Betsy’s murder that Pelton knew about but he, Keibler, did not. Pelton had a good working relationship with President Walker and so, eventually, did the sergeant.11

  Penn State also helped to fund the Aardsma investigation, Keibler said. He calculated that the most intensive months of the investigation had cost the state police $250,000, or just over $1.5 million in today’s money. But other costs were borne by Penn State. “Anything we needed from the university, in regard to money or things like that, it was there,” he said. The university provided access to copiers and paper, paid for some of the hotel rooms used by the state troopers who came to assist the Aardsma investigation from other cities, flew the hypnotist to State College to help in the questioning of Uafinda and Erdely, and provided meals to the investigators, plus their pens, pencils, and notepads. Former troopers Ken Schleiden and Tom Shelar recall getting access to everything they needed, in addition to a “huge, nice-sized office.” But both troopers said they didn’t know what was happening farther up the food chain.12

  Among the original investigators, Mike Simmers, who rose to the rank of captain, was the most skeptical of Penn State’s response to Betsy Aardsma’s murder. He believes that Penn State exercised control over the investigation in terms of what information was released to the public and what wasn’t. “[It’s] not that we didn’t have some good people, like George Keibler, heading it up. George had his hands tied with the lieutenant and also with the university. The university had a lot of control over this. They truly did.” Simmers said the university took its concerns to “Harrisburg,” meaning Governor Shafer, who called himself “Penn State football’s No. 1 fan” and attended many games, sometimes flying to away games with the team, and to Colonel Frank J. McKetta, the state police commissioner appointed by Shafer. “We were told we were basically under a thumb,” he said.13

  Simmers believes that Penn State wanted the Aardsma murder to go away to avoid having the crime damage the image of the university among prospective students and their parents. The university especially did not want the state police to publicly speculate that another student might have been the killer. “Unless you arrest him, don’t you dare say it was a student,” Simmers said. “Say it was Ted Bundy, say it was somebody like that, say it was some deranged guy from out of town, a drug dealer from Philadelphia.” Simmers says the state police were actually told not to raise public suspicions that the killer might have been a student “until you have enough to make an arrest and the DA agrees.” And they never did. In none of the available public statements did the state police speculate that a student might have been the killer, even though they privately [apart from Corporal Dan Brode and his rapist theory] believed that to be the case. Simmers readily acknowledged that on the surface, at the lower levels, Penn State’s cooperation was fine. But that did not mean President Eric Walker was willing to let the chips fall where they may.14

  Trooper Ronald Tyger tended to agree with Simmers. He called the situation “political,” meaning that most colleges and universities, not just Penn State, were reluctant to release damaging information. “They don’t want anything that’s going to interfere with them getting
students back, or getting more students on board,” Tyger said. Penn State didn’t want anything to come out that would “rock the boat. As a result, it was very tough obtaining records and information that you were looking for.” Trooper Kent Bernier, who was the investigator of the Aardsma murder from 2005 to 2009, pointed to Penn State’s mishandling of the first ninety minutes of the investigation. “I don’t think they wanted anything to do with this, once they determined what it was,” he said of the university.15

  One would normally turn to the university archives, both to President Walker’s official papers and to the papers of relevant university offices, for documents telling the story of a murdered student and how the university responded to help the police in their massive, on-campus investigation to find her killer. Unfortunately, that is an exercise in frustration. The Penn State archives appear to have been largely scrubbed of documents relating to the Aardsma case—either that or they never arrived. How else to explain the nearly complete lack of memos, reports, expenditure approvals, and the like regarding a major campus trauma? There is but a single folder of press clippings and press releases related to the early days of the investigation.16

  Any researcher who has delved into the archival records of government or university bureaucracies would expect to find scores of relevant documents. Did Eric Walker never receive any reports on the crime itself and the progress of the investigation or write one of his frequent memos-to-the-file? Did the presence on campus of forty state troopers investigating the first murder of a student in nearly thirty years, questioning two thousand or more students and faculty members as well, generate not a single scrap of paper from campus officials? Were there no letters from concerned parents to Walker? Or between Walker and the board of trustees? The minutes of the January 10, 1970, meeting of the board of trustees—found in the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg, not at Penn State—contain a brief statement that Lieutenant Kimmel “reported on the investigation into the recent homicide involving Miss Betsy Aardsma.” One can easily imagine that a flurry of memos and letters preceded that appearance, but one searches for them in vain. No bureaucracy preserves all documents, but most preserve records related to major events, if only to be able to give an accounting of what was done. It is entirely possible that a file cabinet full of Penn State documents related to the murder of Betsy Aardsma is stored on campus apart from the archives to keep them from public scrutiny. If the Jerry Sandusky investigation at Penn State has shown anything, it is that Happy Valley’s darkest secrets sometimes yield only to subpoena power or extreme public outrage.

  Another curious aspect of this case is the cold, clinical treatment of the Aardsma family by Walker and his staff. One searches Walker’s papers in the Penn State archives in vain for any letter of condolence written by him to the Aardsmas, even though the record shows he wrote such letters to at least six other grieving families in the three months following the murder. Dick Aardsma, Betsy’s father, told reporter Taft Wireback in 1972 that the phone call he made to Raymond O. Murphy, dean of student affairs, on the night his daughter was slain was the only time the family spoke to a university official. And that call did not go well. Wireback wrote in his Focus article that Aardsma was upset by Murphy’s tone. “Whoever he was, he was very cold and short and told me that I would have to wait for the police to call” to get any additional information, Betsy’s father said. When Wireback sought out Walker in 1972 to find out why the Aardsmas had received no condolences from him, the former Penn State president claimed not to remember that a murder of a student had occurred during his tenure.

  There was a rumor, one of many circulating at Penn State, that Walker believed Betsy Aardsma was one of the radical students disrupting his campus. But his assessment, if he indeed believed that, does not ring true. She probably would have called herself a liberal and was a supporter of Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), the Democratic peace candidate in 1968, and other liberal causes. Many other students held similar views. It didn’t make her a dangerous radical or a member of the SDS, although university administrators of the day had a habit of lumping all leftist students together. Trooper Simmers, who was an undercover officer on the Penn State campus and has heard the rumor, said it simply wasn’t true. “She was never on the [radical] list I had back then, a big card file,” he said. “Oh, the SDS was big. I used to go to those meetings. She was never involved in anything like that.” Indeed, the most violent confrontations between student radicals and the university occurred before her arrival at Penn State and after her death, in the spring of 1970.17

  Nearly twenty years after the murder, Esther Aardsma remembered how university officials failed to console the family. “We were completely ignored,” she told Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter Phil Galewitz in 1988. Twenty months later, in a conversation with reporter Ted Anthony of the Daily Collegian, she softened her opinion in one way but sharpened it in another. “The school was quite nice, but we really never met with the administration,” Aardsma said. “I think they were very worried the university would get a bad name. So the victim is sort of pushed aside, I guess.”18

  Penn State administrators from 1969 say little to dispel that notion. Charles L. Lewis, the unpopular vice president for student services in 1969, insisted nearly forty years after the murder that Penn State officials were “all shook up” by Betsy Aardsma’s murder. He sought to put their cold response into perspective: “She was a graduate student,” Lewis said. “We would have no or little contact. She would not be a residence hall person [sic]. Her family would come in and claim the body. They would go in and take care of the apartment wherever she was living, and move on. There was just no reason for us to be involved. Why I’m telling you all this crap, a murder is a serious thing; it’s always serious. But there’s nothing you can do except try to calm the students down and be courteous to the family. You’ve got twenty campuses and you’ve got something bouncing all the time.” Raymond O. Murphy, the dean of student affairs who was at the other end of Betsy’s father’s telephone call on the night of the murder, wondered what all the fuss was about. “There was a limited amount of local interest or information once it happened,” he said in 2008. “She was taken home to Holland and that seemed to be pretty much it. I would have to say, she was a grad student. So nobody would know her particularly. In the administration.”19

  Esther Aardsma probably had it right in 1989 when she lamented that her daughter had been pushed aside, forgotten in the name of the glory of old State.

  Chapter 12

  Here Sits Death

  As 1969 drew to a close, Lieutenant Kimmel and Sergeant Keibler believed that the solution to the murder of Betsy Aardsma still lay somewhere in Happy Valley. But they had no “A-1 suspect,” as Kimmel put it. They needed the Penn State faculty and students to get past their negative feelings toward the state police and help to solve the crime. He even said publicly that the state police were on campus “to work on the murder case and only the murder case.” Not, in other words, as an occupying army aimed at crushing student civil rights and antiwar dissent or busting them for pot smoking in the guise of investigating Betsy Aardsma’s death. But nothing seemed to work. Kimmel was frustrated that very few students were walking in on their own to report information or suspicions. Those who were contacted by troopers were generally cooperative, but they needed people to volunteer tips. A letter sent to all twenty-six thousand students on December 19, a week after they went home for Christmas break, pleaded for information about any known or rumored threats to women students. It yielded almost no responses, and those few tips that did trickle in contained nothing useful.1

  Just before Christmas, Kimmel told Keibler that he was now in full charge of the investigation, saying, “Aardsma’s yours.” Kimmel was moving back to Rockview to resume day-to-day administration of the barracks. The investigation seemed to be fading away; the university announced on December 23 that daily news releases by the Department of Pub
lic Information would be discontinued “until such time as there are new developments to justify releases.” No doubt the state police commanders in Harrisburg hoped that Keibler could turn things around. Kimmel still hoped for a dramatic arrest but was clearly frustrated. “We’re stalemated right now,” he said a day after classes resumed at Penn State for the winter term on January 5, 1970.2

  A promising lead had recently come to naught. A couple of weeks earlier, the state police had first talked to Larry Paul Maurer, the English 501 student who would occupy their thoughts and suspicions for the next four decades, even though he was never arrested and charged, and even though the most that detectives could muster against him was a gut feeling that he had something to do with the Aardsma murder. It was a strange situation.3

  Maurer had grown up on a farm in the Mahantongo Valley of Northumberland County, north of Harrisburg. He was tall and blond, according to his description in the 1964 edition of The Bruin, the yearbook of Mahanoy Joint High School (today Line Mountain High School), and wore eyeglasses. The caption beneath his photo read that he “likes firearms,” not uncommon in the country. Maurer was an avid hunter and fisherman and came off as a bit woodsy. He routinely carried a small hunting knife. Maurer was remembered by Nicholas Joukovsky, one of the two professors who taught the English 501 class, as a very quiet young man. His problem was that when he spoke to the police, he couldn’t stop talking.4