by David DeKok
Ian Osborn, who believes David was serious about Betsy and intended to marry her, says his friend “handled it all very well. He was a very hardworking, fast-talking, somewhat nervous guy who often cracked funny jokes.” Osborn says Wright threw himself into his schoolwork and dealt with Betsy’s death by avoiding thinking about it too much. As close as the two of them were, Wright never spoke to Osborn about the murder. “I never pressed him,” he said. “I spent a whole summer with him working at a hospital in Chicago, and the whole affair was never broached. I was always curious, of course, but I didn’t think it appropriate to question him about any aspect of it.”5
Dennis Wegner returned to Madison, Wisconsin, after the funeral. His wife, Carole, Betsy’s older sister, stayed behind for a time to help her parents. Dennis resumed his graduate studies in medical microbiology, but he never got over her murder. Temporarily alone in their apartment, he found himself in emotional hell. He tried to pretend Betsy had never existed, or that her murder was a bad dream and she would be coming home soon. “I managed to use these forms of denial successfully for short periods of time,” Wegner wrote in an essay, “Coping with Unexpected Death.” “Unfortunately, hearing her name mentioned, seeing her picture, looking at her paintings and writings, or hearing certain reminiscent songs on the radio would snap me back to reality and plunge [me] back down to the bottom.” He eventually found a degree of peace through spiritual counseling he received from a former Hope College roommate, Reverend Warren Bovenkerk, and in providing help and counseling to others who had lost loved ones.6
In January 1972, Dennis and Carole Wegner made headlines when they sent a letter to US Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, asking him to strike down the death penalty and spare the life of whoever killed Betsy, if he was ever caught. The letter was written and signed by Dennis but had the full support of Carole and the rest of the Aardsma family. The letter went in the mail to Burger a few days before the Court heard arguments on January 17 in Furman v. Georgia, a major death penalty case. Copies went to several newspapers around the country, as letters to the editor. The UPI version of the story that ran in the Holland Evening Sentinel quoted Dick and Esther Aardsma as saying they knew Dennis was writing to the chief justice. They “concurred with the spirit” of the letter but had not seen the entire text.7
Wegner’s letter to Burger pleaded for the life of Betsy’s killer and the lives of other condemned prisoners. He portrayed his late sister-in-law as a martyred saint. “Betsy loved America, and the fact that many were without food, medical attention, warmth, and understanding were sources of great pain to her. Her only real concerns in life dealt with the preservation and improvement of human life. Therefore, the execution of her murderer would be a glaring contradiction of everything she lived for,” Wegner wrote. He reminded Burger—anticipating the biblical “eye-for-an-eye” argument—that Jesus Christ had stopped the stoning execution of a prostitute with the words, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Finally, Wegner argued on behalf of the families of condemned prisoners, saying that the death of a loved one is doubly traumatic if they are murdered or executed. He did not want them to experience “the emotional hell that I did.”8
Several months later, the Court ruled, five to four, that the death penalty was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment under certain circumstances. Wegner’s letter didn’t have the hoped-for effect on Burger, who was one of the dissenting votes. Most convicts under sentence of death across America, including Charles Manson and several members of the Manson Family, had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment because of this and later decisions.
Keibler continued to investigate the murder, despite ever-dwindling resources and interest from his superiors. By the end of May in 1970 he was down to six investigators, but he considered that to be an ideal number, easy to manage. At the end of 1970, he turned back the rooms in the Boucke Building to Penn State and moved the investigation back to Rockview. Penn State needed Room 109, which was large, for a classroom. University officials told Keibler he could have other space on campus, but he decided it was time to go. He told Ken Silverman, a reporter for the Daily Collegian, that he and his investigators had talked to at least five thousand people during that first year after Betsy’s murder.9
Asked why the case had not been solved, Keibler always came back to the one-hour delay between the time Betsy was found on the floor of Pattee Library and the discovery by Dr. Elmer Reed that she had been stabbed to death. That, and the slow, disorganized response by Colonel Pelton and the Campus Patrol had allowed evidence to be inadvertently contaminated or destroyed, some during the library mop-up, some by gawkers who tromped through the crime scene, touching books and bookshelves, unrestrained by the Campus Patrol. The delay also provided plenty of time for the murderer and potential witnesses to leave the library and vanish into the darkness.10
“We know there were more than twenty persons in the Core area at the time Betsy was stabbed,” Keibler told Silverman. “Only eight of them have been located—and some of them were brought back from other states so we could talk to them at length. We believe the twelve or more we have never located might have information that could help us.” Taft Wireback, in his 1972 article on the Aardsma case, wrote that Keibler blamed “student apathy” in part for the state police failure to solve the murder.11
Larry Paul Maurer dropped out of Penn State not long after his questioning in the Aardsma murder and returned to his parents’ farm, where he stayed for a short time before enlisting in the army. Why he did this has been the subject of much speculation. Was he running from speculation that he was somehow involved in Betsy’s murder? Had his father, furious at the spectacle his son had made, forced him to enlist to straighten out his life? Or did he simply want to trade the academic life for the army life? It could happen, even with the Vietnam War still raging at the beginning of 1970. Maurer had been in the Naval Reserves, assigned to the State College Reserve Center until November 4, 1969. For whatever reason, after 1970 he disappeared into the army, probably (based on his APO address) to one of the American bases in West Germany and, later, into the super-secret National Security Agency.12
In the spring of 1973, a Federal Bureau of Investigation memo quoted a state police investigator as calling an unnamed man matching Maurer’s description “a prime suspect in this killing, even though there is no strong evidence to support his contention.” It was an odd statement, and Sergeant Keibler today, while acknowledging that the redacted memo referred to him and Maurer, flatly denies that he considered the student a prime suspect. He admitted that Maurer was surrounded by a lot of smoke, but that the polygraph results had eliminated him as a real suspect. Then Keibler added, “I think Maurer made a lot of the smoke by wanting to appear important to the people there. He wanted to let his buddies know that, hey, the state police are still talking to me.”13
Just like the fictional character David Parker, the attention-seeking young actor who taunted police in the movie The Boston Strangler, a film that played at a theater in State College in the month after the murder, Maurer was, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. What did he know about Haefner, his former roommate? Why did he behave in the way that he did? The state police kept him at the center of their thoughts, while, unbeknownst to them, the real killer was still on the Penn State campus, finishing the work for his PhD.
Chapter 25
Hiding in Plain Sight
After returning from Christmas break early in 1970, Rick Haefner slipped back into his daily routine at Penn State. This sort of behavior is not unusual, according to Dr. Stuart W. Twemlow, a retired professor of psychology at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. He was talking about the Boston Marathon bombers to a New York Times reporter in April 2013, but the principle is the same. He said going back to the old routine helps someone who has committed a horrible crime “blot out the horror.” Twe
mlow called it “a normal, dissociative response” that helps the criminal to deny and compartmentalize what he has done. Rick was hiding in plain sight, and with the state police tending to believe that Larry Paul Maurer was the most likely suspect, it seemed unlikely he would be caught, short of an error on his part or a decision by Lauren Wright to reveal to the authorities what happened on the evening of November 28, 1969.1
There seemed little chance of that. Rick continued to work with Wright on his doctoral dissertation. He did on-campus research in the winter and spring terms of 1970, then passed his comprehensive examination, a rite of passage for doctoral students. Beginning in the fall term of 1970 and continuing through the summer term of 1972, he was off-campus, most likely in Lancaster, writing his dissertation and working toward receiving his PhD in geology on September 16, 1972.
When he did come up from Lancaster to consult with Professor Lauren Wright, he often brought young boys with him, according to Charles Hosler, who was dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. He would take the boys to visit the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum, which at that time occupied parts of three floors in the Steidle Building. The museum was a popular attraction for schoolchildren, where they could see such things as the museum’s collection of fluorescent minerals glowing under a black light. Everett Tiffany, Hosler’s assistant, was the first to notice that Haefner was bringing a lot of boys to the museum. He didn’t know that Rick was a pedophile, but something about the visits set off alarms. For a time, Tiffany didn’t say anything.2
But then the curator position at the museum came open and Rick applied for the job. He had enough experience from his years of volunteer work at the North Museum at Franklin & Marshall to warrant serious consideration. He loved museum work and saw it as his favored career. Now Tiffany went to Hosler with his suspicions about Rick’s friendships with boys, and Hosler decided the prudent option was to hire somebody else. “We were very suspicious,” Hosler said. “To tell you the truth, one of the reasons we didn’t even consider it was that we felt he would have used it as an access to boys.”
It is doubtful Rick was ever told exactly why he had been turned down, and not much else changed for him at Penn State. He was allowed to finish his dissertation, and he continued to bring boys to visit the museum, including his young cousin, Chris Haefner, who was then ten or eleven years old, and a boy named Mark who was about twelve years old. Mark was from Aberdeen, Maryland, an area where Rick spent a lot of time, and Chris Haefner came to believe Mark was in a long-term relationship with Rick.3
Confronting men about their unacceptable sexual or other behavior was not the Penn State way, in the early 1970s or for many years afterward. If an involuntary exit from Happy Valley was necessary, it more often occurred in some quiet way that did not alert the public—or, at least, very much of the public—to what had happened. “What I’m saying is . . . the things that would be tolerated here would not be tolerated elsewhere,” Hosler said. Looking at what has happened at Penn State over the years helps when it comes to understanding why Rick Haefner was not expelled or, at the very least, questioned about his apparent attraction to boys, and even why Lauren Wright stayed silent for so long about what had happened at his house the night of Betsy’s murder. There was the scholarly community of Happy Valley, with its moral relativism, and there was the world outside, with its unyielding laws and morality. That contest was really no contest. How Penn State handled Rick Haefner was less an aberration than part of a sad continuum. Was it “policy”? No. It was more business as usual, the way things were handled in this academic community.4
Take the case of Antonio C. Lasaga, a geochemistry professor at Penn State from 1977 to 1984, who was lauded by his peers for his brilliance. His field was chemical kinetics, the study of how quickly or slowly a chemical reaction proceeds. Hosler, who was his dean, considered him a good friend. Tony Lasaga’s professors at Princeton, where the young Cuban émigré obtained his undergraduate degree in 1971, and Harvard, where he subsequently completed his graduate work, could barely find enough superlatives to describe his intellect. Apparently unknown to anyone who mattered, Lasaga was a pedophile. Like Rick Haefner and, later, Jerry Sandusky, he was particularly attracted to prepubescent boys. Even when the truth became impossible to deny, some could not reconcile Lasaga’s desperate pedophilia with the fact that he had a lovely wife and children. They could not comprehend how a man with a wife, or who, like Rick Haefner, claimed to want a serious relationship with a woman, could pursue boys on the side.5
On August 27, 1981, Lasaga, then thirty-one years old, was arrested by police in Patton Township, one of the municipalities that abut State College, and charged with fondling the penises of two boys, ages nine and eleven, at the Park Forest Pool, where he was a member. Park Forest Village was a housing development on the outskirts of State College. The arresting officer, John R. Dodson, persuaded Lasaga to appear voluntarily at the police station for questioning. The Penn State professor admitted to holding the boys upside down—disturbing behavior in and of itself—but denied fondling them.6
Dodson asked Lasaga to take a polygraph exam, which he initially agreed to do. But a few days later, he called back and said he had changed his mind, according to police records. Lasaga told the officer, “Couldn’t we get this thing cleared up?” He argued that he had no criminal record, which may have been more due to luck than virtue. There had been an incident earlier that month reported in the Centre Daily Times in which a boy was molested by an unknown adult male at Holmes-Foster Park in State College, but the perpetrator got away. Lasaga told Dodson he could provide numerous character references and asked him to approach the parents of the two boys about dropping the charges, according to police records. The officer agreed to make the calls, but the families wanted nothing to do with a deal. Lasaga then agreed to a polygraph examination and passed, although the accuracy of the test was later questioned. Whatever happened, it seems to have softened opposition to a deal.7
Lasaga’s claim that he could provide character references was probably true. Hosler says the professor was much admired and loved by everyone in the department. Indeed, the deal that got him off may have been brokered by C. Wayne Burnham, the Geosciences Department chairman, who worshipped his talented junior colleague. The charges were eventually dropped. Hosler heard that Lasaga paid the parents $500 to back off. That was a low price for pedophilia even in 1981, but perhaps after the polygraph result he was in a better bargaining position. Carol Vonada, the departmental secretary, said Burnham referred to one of the parents as “a welfare mother in it for the money.” Not long afterward, Professor Roger Cuffey was standing near the chairman in a hallway, waiting for the start of a faculty meeting, when he overheard Burnham say, “I got Tony off this time.”8
Lasaga stayed another three years at Penn State before accepting a position at Yale University. He could not keep his hands off young boys. His world collapsed in 1998 when he was arrested by the FBI on federal child pornography charges. Investigators concluded that Lasaga had downloaded as many as 150,000 child pornography images via the Yale computer system. A month later, New Haven police accused Lasaga of sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old boy he had met through an inner-city mentoring program. He had been a volunteer in the program since 1992. Some of the child pornography items were videotapes Lasaga made of himself having sex with the boy when he was as young as seven years old. In 2002, he pleaded no contest to the charges against him.9
His colleagues at Penn State were horrified—not at Lasaga’s crimes, which they tended to disbelieve, but at the possibility of a brilliant scholar being lost to science. Two of his former colleagues in the Geosciences Department at Penn State, Hiroshi Ohmoto and Hubert Barnes, testified as character witnesses at his sentencing hearing on the state charges in 2002, pleading for leniency. “He is in his most productive years,” Barnes told the court. “When you penalize Tony for his indiscretions, you also penalize society.” The
Hartford Courant reported that when Barnes referred to Lasaga’s crimes as “indiscretions,” some in the audience gasped. Superior court judge Roland D. Fasano was having none of it. “Even the defendant’s magnificent scientific achievements pale in comparison to the destruction of a young life,” he said. Fasano called the evidence against Lasaga “overwhelming” despite what his friends and family wanted to believe. State’s Attorney David Strollo said he had “never heard people deliver comments so disconnected with reality.”10
Fasano sentenced Lasaga to twenty years in prison, to run concurrently with the fifteen-year sentence he had received on the federal child pornography charges. Lasaga was placed in the federal system to serve his time there first. Barnes and Ohmoto visited him at the federal prison in Beckley, West Virginia, where he served much of his sentence. Barnes says he persuaded the prison authorities to give Lasaga some computer access. Barnes called Lasaga a “Mozart of chemical kinetics” who has remained productive even during his years behind bars. “I continue to visit and interact with Dr. Lasaga to cooperate in producing research papers that I believe are important to advancing our science,” he said. In 2013, a paper of which Lasaga was senior author was said by Barnes to be under review for publication by a leading, peer-reviewed chemistry journal. It all seemed like something out of Alice in Wonderland and puts Professor Lauren Wright’s moral failings in some perspective.11
Hosler, who eventually rose to the position of acting provost at Penn State in 1987 before retiring in 1991, related stories about a number of other professors and officials at Penn State who committed egregious acts. One story concerned a manic-depressive geochemist in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, John Weber, who sexually harassed his female graduate students. Parents complained, but he basically was allowed to continue on his merry way. He kept guns in hollowed-out books in his university office, played around with explosives, and threatened to kill Hosler at one point. Weber later killed himself by drinking 200-proof laboratory alcohol.