by David DeKok
Chapter 23
Death Valley
Rick Haefner’s mentor in the rigorous and research-oriented graduate geology program at Penn State was Professor Lauren A. Wright, who taught Geology of North America and was chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics from 1963 to 1971. Wright joined the faculty in 1961 from the California Division of Mines and Geology, where he and his nearly lifelong research partner, Bennie Troxel, had prepared geologic maps of the southern half of Death Valley National Monument. Later in life, he became known as the “dean of Death Valley geologists.” Wright returned to the hot, beautiful, and dangerous desert nearly every fall, usually taking a student or two along with him, and always staying in a house trailer he owned in the desert crossroads of Shoshone, California. He would have gotten to know Rick one way or another as chairman of the department, but for whatever reason, they hit it off.1
It was Wright who suggested to Haefner that he might want to consider Death Valley as a good locale for his own research, and agreed to be his master’s thesis advisor. He invited Rick to accompany him to Death Valley during the fall and winter of 1967 to do the field research for his thesis. That made it easier for Wright, because it was Penn State’s practice to send the thesis advisor to verify the fieldwork and surveys of a geology graduate student to make sure the measurements were right. Most graduate students went out on their own to do research, but it wasn’t unheard of for both the professor and the student to be out together.2
Rick did reasonably well in his graduate studies at Penn State. He had a rough start, earning a C in a nonmetallic crystal chemistry course and withdrawing from a physical chemistry class (typically a move to avoid a poor grade), which he took again the following year, and likewise earned a C, the minimum passing grade for graduate students. In his geology and non-math courses that first year, however, he scored straight As.3
One thing Haefner didn’t have to worry about at Penn State was the draft, despite the river of induction notices going out to feed the Vietnam War military. Indeed, draft calls doubled in 1965 over 1964, and rose more than 50 percent again in 1966 before settling down somewhat in 1967. But Haefner, like most college students of the era, had received the 2-S student deferment, available to both undergraduate and graduate students, first at Franklin & Marshall College and then at Penn State. (New graduate deferments were ended in 1967, but those who already had them, like Rick Haefner, were usually allowed to keep them, so he had little chance of being drafted into military service.) Nor was there any necessity for him to confront his sexual attraction to boys. Whether that would have been unearthed in the psychological or moral fitness examinations if he had been called for his draft physical is hard to say, but because of congressional policy, he was deferred from the draft while he pursued his studies, provided he kept his grades above a middling level, which he did.4
Wright eventually figured out that Haefner was not a normal heterosexual male, although the extent of that knowledge may have been his observation that Rick was uncomfortable around women and rarely seen in their company. He even commented on it to other students who worked around Rick, saying on one occasion that he “wasn’t sure Rick really liked girls.” Those who knew Wright, who died in 2013, universally labeled him as someone who tried to see the best in people. “He never gave me a hard time,” said Joe Head, an undergraduate geology student at Penn State when Rick was there. “I was not a good geology student, but we hit it off personally. He was a person who seemed to want to think the best and believe the best and encourage you, rather than being critical.” Geology professor Roger Cuffey, who occasionally counseled gay students and employed Rick as a teaching assistant, took a different view, believing him simply a socially inept young man. “Rick fit into what we nowadays would call a geek kind of position. He got up the courage occasionally to ask a couple of girls out here and there.”5
Haefner and Wright left by car on their research trip to Death Valley around the start of the fall term on October 1, 1967. Their field work could only be done between late September and the middle of May, because the brutal heat in Death Valley regularly soared past 110 degrees in the summer months. Accompanying them was Joe Head, who on a whim had signed up as Haefner’s field assistant after seeing the job posted on a bulletin board in the Deike Building, where the geology department was located. Head later learned it wasn’t typical for graduate students to have field assistants—that they usually did all the work themselves. Did Wright want a third person along as a buffer between himself and Rick’s weirdness, or even because of nagging doubts about Rick’s sexuality? Perhaps he worried about gossip.6
Wright and Haefner did most of the driving on the 2,400-mile trip from State College to the professor’s double-wide trailer in Shoshone, following a meandering route across the West. In Missouri, they picked up US Route 160 and followed it across southern Colorado, passing Mesa Verde, the ancient Native American cliff dwellings, and stopping at Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah come together. Like nearly every tourist did at Four Corners, Rick had his picture taken in a crab squat with his feet in two of the states and his hands in the other two, which allowed him to claim he was in four states at once. Then it was on to the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, and, finally, to Las Vegas, the jumping-off point for Shoshone, still eighty-five miles distant. At the time, Las Vegas was the last vestige of civilization before Death Valley, the place for car repair or medical care or to load up on supplies at a more reasonable price.7
They emerged from the desert into the lights and glitter of the Las Vegas Strip, where they stayed overnight and went to a “rather risqué” show. “It was kind of like a chorus line,” Head said. “They may even have been topless, I can’t remember.” In the morning, the trio got back on the road, quickly leaving the city behind and entering the red rock desert moonscape. They saw only sporadic signs of human habitation until they reached Pahrump, Nevada, then much smaller and less commercially developed than today. In the middle of town, they made a left turn onto a lonely, two-lane highway that took them back out into the desert.
Founded in 1910 by Ralph J. “Dad” Fairbanks, Shoshone once served as a home for the men who worked in the borax mines in the surrounding desert. Some of the miners even dug their own caves and lived in them, receiving free, natural air-conditioning during the sweltering summers. Fairbanks and later his descendants owned nearly everything in the town. If you lived in a house, it was rented from the family. If you owned a trailer, as Wright did, you still paid ground rent to whichever member of the family happened to be in charge. Fairbanks’s daughter Stella and her husband, Senator Charles Brown (he served in the California Senate from 1938 to 1962), took over Shoshone in 1927. Their daughter, Bernice Sorrells, and her husband, Maury, took over in 1942. Bernice was still in charge the day Wright, Haefner, and Head pulled into town. Her husband had died in a plane crash in 1965. Wright knew her well.8
During the ten weeks they were in Shoshone, Head spent most days in the field with Rick, helping him to conduct research for his master’s thesis. This consisted mainly of driving Haefner to the site of his research about ten miles northwest of Shoshone in the Greenwater Range near Deadman Pass and driving him back to the trailer at day’s end in the four-wheel drive Ford Bronco that Penn State kept in Shoshone for Wright’s use. Only toward the end of the trip was Head allowed to do some mapping on his own. Haefner was investigating the location and cooling history of a rhyolite unit, a huge, thick mass of volcanic rock that might run for miles. At his research site, the rhyolite was exposed in layers of pink, yellow, and gray. Professor Wright was usually off in a different location doing his own research, sometimes accompanied by his old friend, Bennie Troxel.9
Life was not all work in Shoshone. The three of them would sometimes go swimming in the municipal pool after dark, letting the warm, volcanic water ease muscles tired from a day in the desert. One time they drove 240 miles to the Los Angeles a
rea. Rick’s brother, George Haefner Jr., was an electrical engineer for Hughes Aircraft and lived in Huntingdon Beach. Once a year, Hughes would take over Disneyland in Anaheim for a night and treat its thousands of employees and their families to a free evening of fun at the storied amusement park. Head remembers driving to Huntingdon Beach, having dinner with George and his family, and then spending the night there after they returned from Disneyland. “Rick’s family—his brother seemed nice, and I didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable,” Head said. “They seemed like they were really good friends as brothers.” That would prove to be an understatement; George Haefner, like his parents, would prove to be a fierce defender of his brother against those who would hold Rick responsible for his sex crimes.10
On Thanksgiving weekend, about two weeks before the end of their stay, Professor Wright, Rick, and Joe Head were invited to Bernice Sorrells’s home for dinner. Her daughter, Susan, who was a senior English major at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, had flown home for the holiday weekend and was at the dinner. She was attractive, with brown eyes and dark hair cut in a bob. Head did not recall any noticeable interaction between Rick and Susan that night, but it marked the start of Rick’s infatuation with her. She was serious, smart, and eager to engage the world. Sorrells, whose classmates at Smith included Catherine MacKinnon, the feminist legal scholar, and Diana Kerry, sister of former senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, eventually would do a tour in the Peace Corps in Liberia. She was a lot like Betsy Aardsma, but different, too, especially in hairstyle. The three men left Shoshone around December 10 to drive back to State College. Susan was quite done with Rick, but he was not done with her.11
Rick may have seen in Susan what he would see in Betsy and other women later in his life: unwitting cover for what he was. There is no evidence any of them understood the role he planned for them in his life. In the spring of 1968, he drove six hours and nearly four hundred miles from Penn State to Smith College and knocked on Susan’s door in Morrow House, her dorm. When she answered and expressed astonishment at him being there, he said he had a crush on her, or words to that effect. That didn’t go over well. Susan asked him to leave, finding his presence bizarre and a little threatening, and he slunk away. She complained to her mother, who complained to Lauren Wright, who depended on Bernice Sorrells’s good graces to remain welcome in the tiny town she owned, and where he leased a trailer space from her. They must have worked out an accommodation, because in the fall of 1968, Rick was back in Shoshone with Lauren Wright and a new field assistant, Dan Stephens. Stephens remembers that Wright seemed to be paying close attention to Rick’s interactions with Susan, who had graduated from Smith by then. Rick was on his best behavior. The three of them went to dinner at the Sorrells house more than once that fall, Stephens said.12
Like Joe Head, Dan Stephens served as Rick’s driver. After cooking breakfast for Rick and Professor Wright, he would load up the Ford Bronco and drive Haefner out to the spot in the desert where his mapping for the day would begin. Rick was working on his doctoral dissertation, doing further research on the same rock formation he had studied for his master’s thesis. He called this formation the “Shoshone volcanics.” Wright and Bennie Troxel, when he was there, went off on their own. At day’s end, Stephens would pick up Rick at a predesignated location. They spent little time together during the day, because Stephens would be given mapping assignments of his own elsewhere in the lonely desert, often miles away from Haefner. At night, back in the trailer in Shoshone, Stephens would cook dinner for Rick and Professor Wright, and afterward they would compare notes on what they had done that day and perhaps test some of the rocks. On many nights, Dan and Rick listened to Wolfman Jack’s raspy voice as he played rock and roll and Motown hits on station XERB-AM out of Tijuana, Mexico, more than three hundred miles away. It was about the only entertainment available out in the desert.13
Stephens didn’t really care for Rick, considering him nerdy and annoying. “He had these glasses which, at first, made him seem like he was looking down his nose at you,” Stephens remembered. “Dark-rimmed glasses. And he always seemed to wear those baggy, khaki pants.” Rick was also a neat freak, he said, an odd characteristic for a geologist. Geologists are forever getting dirty. “He always had a clean shirt,” Stephens said. “That’s a little odd for a geologist.” Rick could be moody or he could be giddy, giggly, and bubbly, he said. Wright, he said, referenced his graduate student’s “troubles with girls” a couple of times during the trip, once even commenting that he wasn’t sure Rick even liked girls.
Toward the end of October, sensing that Dan was near the breaking point with Rick, Wright invited him to accompany him and Bennie Troxel on a weeklong field trip. Stephens jumped at the chance, and Rick was left alone with the Ford Bronco. He went back alone into the desert, where he is likely to have encountered no one, unless . . .
Among the intriguing but ultimately unanswerable questions in this story is whether Rick briefly came under the spell of his desert neighbor, Charles Manson, during his week alone. Manson and his nominal second in command, Paul Watkins, were roaming Death Valley in dune buggies that fall, looking for the mythical “Hole in the Desert” where the Family was supposed to hide out during Helter Skelter. The women in the Family, including Susan Atkins, sometimes panhandled in Shoshone. Who better for Manson to stop and ask about a weird geological formation than a geologist? And maybe invite him back to the Barker Ranch for some drugs, sex, music, and listening to Charlie rap about life and death. Manson did this with a number of young men he saw as potential recruits. But there is no proof that this ever happened with Rick, even if Haefner did develop several Manson-like characteristics. The most notable was the casual, philosophical attitude toward murder and death he would voice in later years. Manson taught his followers that it was not wrong to kill a human being. To Charlie, according to Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor at his trial, murder and death were no more important “than eating an ice-cream cone.” Rick’s philosophy was much the same. Not that Manson was the only possible source for that. But it is, as they say, food for thought.14
Chapter 24
Left Behind
One night in May of 1970, Louis C. Cotts, Betsy’s uncle, had a terrifying nightmare about her death. The terror ended only when Betsy came to him in the dream and told him that she was okay, that things were okay. She told him she was happy in Heaven and had no desire to return to the living. He awoke sobbing and continued to express emotion for several hours. About two weeks later, according to Dennis Wegner, Betsy’s brother-in-law, Cotts died when a pulmonary aneurysm burst in roughly the same spot where the killer’s knife had nicked Betsy’s pulmonary artery. She had been his favorite niece, he had urged her to go to Penn State to get away from the Coed Killer, and he never got over her murder.1
Neither did any other close family members. Dick Aardsma, her father, sank back into alcohol and bad driving, not necessarily together. A gentle man who liked to read history, his alcohol problem predated Betsy’s death. Jan Sasamoto, Betsy’s friend, recalled that she thought him a little different, a little silly at times. And a terrible driver, which she did not connect with his drinking until much later. On February 20, 1971, a Saturday, Dick Aardsma was driving north on M-40 around 8:40 a.m. when his car collided with another car on wet pavement near the big curve in the highway at East 48th Street, a mile or two from his house. Aardsma, who was fifty-five years old, was admitted to Holland Hospital with injuries to his nose, chest, and right arm. Two teenagers in the other car, both members of the Holland Christian High School wrestling team, were treated for cuts and bruises.2
Esther Aardsma descended into deep depression after her daughter’s death but coped with it largely on her own. Therapy was not a realistic option in Holland at that time. She and Dick kept to themselves. Bernice Kolenbrander, a neighbor for years on East 37th Street, said she didn’t know them very well. “They were quiet people,” she sa
id. Neither parent phoned for updates on their daughter’s case, according to Sergeant George Keibler, the lead investigator of the murder. For the first three or four years after 1969, Keibler made a point of calling them once a year, or more often if he thought they might have seen something in the media about the investigation. There wasn’t much news coverage after the spring of 1970, though, just anniversary updates that reported the murder was still unsolved. Keibler told his men that any call to the Aardsmas had to be cleared through him. He didn’t want them bothered about something minor.3
David L. Wright, Betsy’s boyfriend and unofficial fiancé, says he grieved for “two or three months” after her murder, a period that was “pretty bleak.” Then he started dating again, first with a nursing student, according to his medical school friend, Ian Osborn, and then, according to Wright, with the roommate of Osborn’s girlfriend at Elizabethtown College near Hershey. She eventually became his wife and was described by a friend as “very, very nice, but very different from Betsy.” Their friends had always wondered about the ultimate staying power of a relationship between a liberal, artistic, free spirit and a politically and socially conservative physician. Wright, over the years, has projected Hamlet-like ambivalence about Betsy, whether or not he actually felt that way. “I’m never sure if you’re 100 percent certain when you get engaged if that’s the right person,” Wright said. “I’m sure we would have gotten engaged that Christmas and married the next summer, but then you kind of go back and forth. Then I’m thinking, ‘Gee, now I’m totally free and I can look around.’ It’s just a weird feeling.”4