by David DeKok
Another woman in English 501, an attractive blonde from Aliquippa, Marilee Erdely, had taken note of how Maurer gazed at Betsy. Erdely, who was friendly with Maurer, had acted as an intermediary between him and Betsy, who is said to have let him buy her coffee once. But when he asked her out to a movie, she turned him down, telling Erdely later with a laugh that he was too much the “forest ranger.” Maurer probably reacted as any boy did in this situation, with a mixture of hurt and embarrassment. Yet he could not avoid her, because he saw her in class each week and in Pattee Library when they had to find research materials.1
The other man interested in Betsy was Richard Charles Haefner, a geology graduate student from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Haefner, who went by Rick, lived in Atherton Hall and had been admitted to the doctoral program the previous June. He was due to get his master’s degree in December. Rick was twenty-five years old, just over six feet tall, and handsome. Although he came off as highly intelligent to some people (indeed, his IQ was in the top 5 percent), to others he seemed condescending. Nerdy, clean-cut, and neatly dressed at a time when that was fast going out of style among male college students, it was easy to imagine him as a foreign correspondent in a Burberry trench coat or a college professor in a Harris tweed jacket. The black horn-rimmed glasses he wore could make him appear to be looking down his nose at lesser mortals. Only the khaki work pants he often wore, whether in the hard-baked desert of Death Valley, where he did the field research for his advanced degrees, or the hallways of Happy Valley, betrayed him as a geologist. Haefner considered himself to be on the road to becoming an important member of that profession.2
Rick’s home on campus since the fall of 1966 had been Room 303 of Atherton Hall. Maurer was assigned as Rick’s roommate at the beginning of the fall term in 1969. For whatever reason—either they didn’t get along or Rick wanted to live by himself—Rick moved to Room 48 early in the fall semester and, two days after that, to a single, Room 64, when it became available. He was a loner, selective in whom he chose as his friends. Geology professor Roger Cuffey, for whom he worked as a teaching assistant in Cuffey’s historical geology course for three terms, saw nothing abnormal about Rick. He found him to be conscientious, decent, and helpful.3
But Haefner had a dark side that only a few knew about. He had regularly carried a narrow-bladed homemade knife, a shiv, since his years at J. P. McCaskey High School in Lancaster, when the other boys would taunt and harass him over his perceived homosexuality. According to his cousin, Christopher Haefner, Rick had wanted a weapon that fit comfortably in his oversized hand, and he liked the feel of the cylindrical wooden handle of an awl. There was no one way to hold it. So he removed the steel point of the awl, widened the opening where the shaft had entered the handle, and wedged in a knife blade that was slightly narrower than a penny and three to four inches long. In later years, Chris watched him sharpen the blade on a grinding wheel in his rock shop. He kept a ball of tape on the tip of the blade to avoid nicking himself.4
Had the boys at McCaskey known the truth about Rick Haefner’s sexual orientation, it might have been even worse. He was a pedophile attracted to prepubescent boys. There had been several incidents in his hometown of Lancaster, where Rick was the scion of a once-great brewery family gone to seed. Although he had been confronted by adults about his pedophilia, he had so far escaped the attention of the police. Haefner had a great fear of being exposed as a child molester, fearing it would wreck his career.
Why did Betsy not sense danger until it was too late? Luke Kliphuis, her high school beau, believes that her sheltered upbringing in Holland left her with no good ability to sniff out peril or deal effectively with people who seemed odd but didn’t wear danger on their sleeve. At Holland High School, Betsy had been surrounded by a tight-knit circle of friends and had never even had to deal with a problematic boyfriend, let alone an obsessive stalker. She had tangled with Darryl at Hope College, but that was minor and they later resumed their friendship. At the University of Michigan, she dated a future physician, David L. Wright. His friends were her friends. But she was also curious, open to new people and experiences, and accustomed to young men joining her circle of admirers. Because she was nice, smart, and pretty, she would have been a “nerd magnet” at Penn State, Kliphuis said. She didn’t mind. They were like her—smart students, good people. Except when they only seemed to be.5
Nor did Kliphuis believe she would have readily shared with the people around her that she was having problems with an admirer. “She was not going to let you know what was going on in her head,” he said. Betsy wrote letters that fall to Jan Sasamoto, Peggy Wich, and Olga Lozowchuk, but none of them could remember any references to problems with a young man. “Betsy and I wrote frequently,” Lozowchuk said. “I remember Betsy writing me that she had met a fellow by the name of Guy. I thought, ‘What an unusual name.’ I assumed he was a fellow student, but I can’t be sure.” Her friend Linda Marsa could remember nothing about any threats. David L. Wright either, although it might well have been awkward for her to tell him that she was worried about some guy she had gone out with once or twice. The hectic life of a graduate student didn’t leave much time for long, leisurely conversations with friends in any case.6
Much of what we know about Rick Haefner’s interactions with Betsy comes from statements he reportedly made to a state trooper, Ken Schleiden, during the early days of the murder investigation. As reported by State College magazine writer Sascha Skucek, he told police that he had met Betsy outside Atherton Hall not long after she’d first arrived on campus in September. During October, they went for ice cream at the Creamery, a Penn State institution, dinner at the Nittany Lion Inn on campus, and bowling at Bellefonte Lanes, which suggests that he had a car, since the bowling alley is nine miles from Atherton Hall. Rick recounted that Betsy told him (as she told others) that she had come to Penn State because of the Coed Killer at the University of Michigan. According to Skucek, the state police also heard from Sharon Brandt, Betsy’s roommate, that she had seen Betsy and Rick together. And around 2010–11, Trooper Leigh Barrows, assigned to the Aardsma case, talked to Charles Hosler, retired dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and mentioned to him the encounters Rick had had with Betsy during a long conversation about the case.7
Betsy’s brief friendship with Haefner ended badly after about four weeks. She told her family in Michigan that she considered Rick to be “a creep.” Ominously, she began to have premonitions of her own early death. More than once that fall, she expressed those thoughts to her family. Both verbally and in letters, she said that she had to accomplish many things because her time on Earth was limited. She wrote, “Time has already run out on me, even before I start. It matters little how long the time really is. It just has to be used.” About a month before her death, she told her mother that she didn’t know why she was at Penn State, that she had a “weird feeling” about being there. Her family dismissed the premonitions.8
David L. Wright did sense, at least vaguely, that something was wrong. After Betsy had been in State College for a month, around the time she stopped spending any time at all with Haefner, she told David that she wanted to move down to Harrisburg permanently and enroll at the branch campus of Penn State there. She told him more than once how “ridiculous” it was to be apart. “In retrospect, when I thought about that, I’m wondering if she was worried about something up there. My wife’s theory is that she just wanted to move things along and be closer.” She and David made plans to spend Thanksgiving together. Holland and home were five hundred miles away. It was just too far to travel, and of course, she had no car.9
In the meantime, Betsy became more involved in the antiwar and civil rights movement at Penn State. On November 14, 1969, she joined in teach-in activities on the Penn State campus, part of a nationwide protest that weekend, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, organized by some of the same people who had organized Senator Eugene McCarthy’s campaign
for president. The main event was a march by a half-million people in Washington, DC, demanding that President Nixon end the war. They were led by folksinger Pete Seeger in singing a new song by John Lennon, “Give Peace a Chance.” Nixon put out word that he watched sports on TV at the White House while the mass protest went on nearby.
At the Penn State campus that day, the protests were on a smaller scale but no less fervent. Betsy led a one-hour discussion at 3:30 p.m. in Room 215 of the Hetzel Union Building on “The War and Black Authors,” then yielded the microphone to a math student who led a discussion on “Science and the War.” Betsy had been truly captivated by the black authors she had read in Davis’s course, marveling at their take on the American experience that was so different from her own.10
In their letters, Betsy and Jan Sasamoto had discussed the possibility of Betsy traveling to Charleston, West Virginia, over Thanksgiving, but in truth, Charleston was 330 miles from State College, well over half the distance that Holland was, and would have been a complicated weekend trip from Penn State for someone like Betsy, without a car. She dropped the idea and looked forward to seeing David. She and David had not yet become formally engaged but were looking at engagement rings. Everyone assumed an announcement would come at Christmas, perhaps with a wedding the following summer.11
On Thanksgiving morning, Betsy took the bus to Harrisburg, and David met her at the station on Market Street. During the twenty-minute drive to Hershey, they talked about their plans for the day. Some of the female medical students were cooking Thanksgiving dinner for themselves and a few of their men friends from the class. Between six and eight people were at the dinner that afternoon, including David and Betsy. He recalled it as “just a real nice time.” There was no hint of any quarrel between them, any problem in the relationship. Betsy phoned her family in Holland and assured them everything was fine, and that she would be home for Christmas. Afterward, they talked about whether she would stay for the weekend. In the end, their studies won out. David had finals coming up, and Betsy had a paper due for Professor Meserole. According to him, it was her choice to go back to Penn State. David drove Betsy to the bus station that night, kissed her good-bye, and never saw her alive again.12
Chapter 20
Murder
On November 28, 1969, the final morning of her life, Betsy Aardsma awoke late, showered, dressed, put on her contact lenses, and then wrote a letter to David, as she did nearly every day. It had been a late night. After the bus ride back to State College, she had stayed up talking to Sharon Brandt, her roommate. She folded the sheet of stationery neatly, placed it in an envelope, licked and applied a six-cent stamp, and dropped the letter in the dorm mailbox. She had a paper to write for English 501.
Betsy decided to grab some lunch. She set off walking up the gently curving path that traversed the ground between Atherton Hall and the HUB. The sidewalk hugged the edge of a broad lawn that Penn State University had so far spared from its building boom. The air was cold, a little over 30 degrees, but there was no snow on the ground. Perhaps feeling girlish and happy that morning, Betsy had put on a red, sleeveless dress over a white cotton turtleneck sweater—she could have passed for a Holland High School cheerleader with those clothes and those colors—plus panty hose to provide a modicum of warmth to her legs. Old habits died hard. Holland High had not allowed girls to wear slacks to school even in the dead of winter, even if there was deep, drifting snow. Girls there were about a year away from protesting the gross unfairness of that policy and getting it changed. She also wore a winter coat, scarf, and gloves, which were found in Pattee Library after her death.1
The campus seemed empty. Hardly anybody was in the dining hall. Most students, unless they were from foreign countries or distant states, or were graduate students like herself with papers to finish, had gone home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Her paper for Professor Meserole was due in less than two weeks. Betsy went through the line and then sat down at a table with her tray.
Her English 501 assignment was to write a critical study of a manuscript from the Pattee Library rare books room, or of one of a number of photocopies Meserole had made of early American manuscripts in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, or the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. Betsy had chosen one of Meserole’s photocopies from the Massachusetts Historical Society for her term paper. It was an American transcription of an anonymous English satirical poem from around 1670, “New Instructions to a Painter.” She needed to transcribe the text of the manuscript, establish authorship—the most likely suspect was Andrew Marvell—and date, reconstruct its historical context, and explain anything that would not be clear to a modern reader. It was difficult detective work, and it made the English 501 students crazy.2
Nearly everyone in the English 501 class, including Betsy, would be in the Level 2 stacks at Pattee Library that afternoon. A little before 4:00 p.m., Betsy Aardsma and Sharon Brandt left Atherton Hall for the library, where they each had work to do. It was a ten-minute walk. They went out the side door of Atherton and followed the sidewalk leading across the lawn and between the Henderson buildings. Then they traversed the lawn in front of Old Main, site of so many demonstrations over the past two years, before finally reaching the Mall and turning right toward Pattee Library, still nearly a quarter-mile away, walking beneath the majestic elm trees that the university went to so much trouble and expense to protect. At the library, they said good-bye, promising to meet for dinner at seven o’clock and then go see a movie.
After Sharon went inside to her carrel, Betsy was about to go downstairs to Professor Meserole’s office but remembered at the last minute that Professor Joukovsky had asked to see her. She wasn’t sure how late he would be there, so she headed back down the library steps and over to the Burrowes Building, which was perpendicular to the library at its eastern end, and was the home of the English Department, or at least most of it. Henry W. Sams, the department chairman, had his office there. Joukovsky’s office, Room 31 [now Room 13], was easy to find. After Betsy went through the south-door entrance off the Mall, it was the first office on the right. She sat down with a couple of other English 501 students in the waiting area.3
Joukovsky needed to see one of the source books she had used for her paper about Dr. Arbuthnot, which she had written for him earlier in the term. He did not know Betsy well. As always, she tended to be the quiet girl who studied hard and got good grades, blending into the mass of her fellow students. He asked her if she still had the book. “It was very important,” Joukovsky recalled more than forty years later. “I wanted to see that to evaluate her paper.” Betsy said she had already returned it to Pattee Library, but offered to retrieve it and bring it to him after she went to see Meserole about her current paper later in the day. It was about 4:15 p.m. when she walked back to Pattee Library, where Meserole had his office.4
Despite the holiday weekend, there were quite a few students in the library. Some have claimed the library was nearly empty, but the statistics don’t show that. The total for the day was 3,148, compared to 4,632 the previous Friday, according to library statistics in the Penn State Archives. Betsy went down to the Level 2 stacks and left her coat and scarf at her carrel; then she went briefly to look for a book in the Core, possibly the book that Professor Joukovsky wanted to see, before her 4:30 appointment with Dr. Meserole. Dean Brungart, the assistant stacks supervisor, saw her between two rows of books toward the middle of the Core when he went downstairs to retrieve a book shortly before his shift ended at 4:30 p.m.5
Betsy didn’t tarry long in the stacks, moving on through the library maze to Meserole’s office, where members of the English 501 class had been coming and going all afternoon. One of them, David R. Johnson, was just leaving to pick up his son at the babysitter and greeted Betsy as they passed in the doorway. Priscilla Letterman, Meserole’s secretary and later his wife, complimented her on the red dress she was weari
ng. She spent about fifteen minutes with the professor discussing “New Instructions to a Painter” and the paper she planned to write. They talked about what else she needed for her paper. All of that material, it seemed, was in the Level 2 stacks. Betsy left Meserole’s office around 4:45 and returned to the main floor to use the card catalog, where she was observed by a member of her class, who was never publicly identified by the state police. Was it Marilee Erdely, who told police she saw Betsy not long before the murder? In any case, Betsy found the cards for the books she needed and made notes of their call numbers. Then she walked to the nearby door, opened it, and descended the narrow staircase into the gloomy and dimly lit stacks. It was about seven or eight minutes before 5:00 p.m. No one was following her, Sergeant Keibler believed.6
Dean Brungart had seen something else during his brief foray into the stacks: Two young men were talking to each other at the western end of the Core. “There was no one else in the Core,” he told Mike Lenio of the Daily Collegian in 1987. One of the two young men was later identified by Brungart as Larry Paul Maurer, who was in English 501 and would later admit to state police investigators that he was in or near the Core around the time of Betsy’s murder. But Brungart didn’t or couldn’t identify the other young man.7
From all that is known today, the author concludes that the killer of Betsy Aardsma was Richard Charles Haefner, the geology graduate student who was obsessed with her. Why was he there? He had no known reason to be in the English literature section of the library. Was he stalking her? Had someone else from English 501 told him she would be there? Many of the answers may never be known. What set him off in the stacks? Had Betsy stumbled upon him as he leered at the Dutch porn magazine found near the murder site, perhaps while masturbating? He was a devotee of pornography. In 1992, police in Chincoteague, Virginia, would find a large collection of “fairly disgusting” porn in Haefner’s van after they arrested him in connection with taking an underage boy to the shore without his mother’s knowledge. Ample evidence of someone’s masturbation was found in the area of the crime site the following day by Mary Willard, the forensic chemist from the Penn State faculty. Perhaps it was not Haefner’s first visit. And as would be evident throughout his life, Haefner had a scary, volatile temper when it came to women—especially women who crossed him.8