by David DeKok
When Penn State did crack down on bad behavior by its staff, there often seemed to be a lesbian in the mix. Hosler told the story of a dean who was hired, with much fanfare, by the Penn State president. Within two weeks, he said, the university was trying to get rid of her, having discovered she was a bad alcoholic. Her greater sin, though, appeared to be that she was disruptive to the existing lesbian social order. As Hosler put it, she found lovers by breaking up lesbian couples on campus. The dean was eventually paid as much as $400,000 over five years to leave, he said. Then there was the woman at the university press who allegedly sexually harassed women who worked for her—for example, by leaving candy vaginas on their desks. “And these country girls, born-again Christians, were just going up the wall,” Hosler said. Her boss fired her, she sued, and she eventually won a $50,000 settlement on grounds of antigay discrimination, and a job in another department of the university.12
There certainly was no Penn State official policy to tolerate faculty misbehavior—just incident after incident of looking the other way.
Chapter 26
Downfall
Haefner spent the year after he received his PhD looking for work. His first professional job was an adjunct position as a visiting assistant professor of geology at the State University of New York at New Paltz during the 1973–74 school year. That was followed by another adjunct position during 1974–75 as an assistant professor of geology at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Michael P. Katuna, chairman of the department when Haefner was there, said Rick did not cause any problems, and students thought he was a good professor. “A very likable but quiet individual,” Katuna remembered. Haefner could put on the charm when he needed to.
Yet he found he didn’t really like teaching, and he searched for employment in the field he really loved, not entirely for legitimate reasons: museum work. At the same time, beginning in the early 1970s, Rick owned and operated a rock shop in a rented, four-door garage on the other side of the narrow alley adjoining his parents’ house at 217 Nevin Street in Lancaster. The shop, which had no sign or name, was not the kind that caters to rock hounds looking to buy colorful minerals or fossils to add to their collections. It was more like a little factory, manufacturing boxed sets of mineral specimens. Rick had originally assembled collections of Pennsylvania minerals, which he sold to museums such as the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, for resale in their gift shop. After not too long, he began making sets of specimens from a wider territory and sold them to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, for resale in their gift shop, a relationship that continued for more than twenty years. The Smithsonian, because of record destruction, could not verify the business relationship, but there seems little doubt that one existed. Chris Haefner, Rick’s cousin, described accompanying Rick when he made deliveries of the rock boxes to the Smithsonian.1
Rick employed neighborhood boys to help him crack mineral specimens into smaller pieces and assemble the boxed sets paying them $30 to $40 a week for part-time work, much more than they could have earned most other places in the early 1970s. During the summer, when work was at its peak, the old wooden garage doors would stand open for ventilation and Rick would flit in and out of the building “like a fly,” one neighbor observed. It seems to have been a profitable business. He charged a wholesale price of five dollars for one of the boxed sets, and sold between a thousand and two thousand per year. Every couple of months, on a Saturday, he would load up a trailer with hundreds of the boxed sets and make the two-hour drive to the Smithsonian, usually with one or more of the boys coming along as helpers.
Often that included his young cousin, Christopher L. Haefner. Actually, Chris’s father and Rick were first cousins. That made Chris a first cousin, once removed, of Rick, but because of the age difference, Rick seemed more like an uncle. Chris was thirteen years old when he started working for Rick, who was then twenty-nine years old, in the summer of 1973. He worshipped his cousin, thought he was cool, but eventually came to wish he was four or five times removed from Rick instead of once.2
Chris went to Sacred Heart Catholic School, about four blocks from his family home at 131 North Pine Street. Coming home after school, he would often use the alley that ran between Nevin and Pine Streets, which passed the garage where Rick and his workers made the boxed sets. At the time, he did not realize that the people in the house on the other side of the alley were Haefner relatives. Chris saw bits of unusual and colorful rocks next to the garage and began to pocket the ones he fancied. An “old lady”—Ere Haefner, Rick’s mother—sometimes saw him take the rocks and yelled at him from the nearby house. Chris would hurry away with his treasures. One day she came out and confronted him. He protested that the rocks dumped by the alley were no one’s property and were worthless. Ere agreed but chastised him anyway. At that moment, Rick stepped out of the garage and intervened. He figured out that Chris was a Haefner relative, and this seemed to calm his mother down. The two families had drifted apart. His parents and George and Ere rarely socialized, and he was unaware until that day that the woman who yelled at him was related to him. Rick invited Chris into the rock shop and had him try on a pair of cracking gloves. He showed him how to break rocks for the boxed sets and put him to work that very day. Soon, he was earning $1.65 per hour, or $30 to $40 per week—enough to keep him well supplied with candy, Tastykakes, and comic books.3
Rick’s world fascinated him. Chris was thrilled to work at the rock shop and to hang out with his cousin. “I loved it,” he said. “It was a great feel. Rick recognized the fact that I was interested in geology, and became a mentor to me.” Chris considered his cousin to be a genius, pure and simple, albeit one who could come off to the unaware as sort of an Andy Taylor country bumpkin.4 Late in the summer of 1973, before he headed off to SUNY New Paltz to teach geology, Rick invited Chris and his brother to go camping with him at the entrance of an old silver mine near Pequea, ten miles southwest of Lancaster. As they roasted hot dogs over a fire, Rick explained that the mine had been opened in the Colonial era and had been flooded for nearly a hundred years, ever since miners in 1875 had broken into a pocket of water. Chris was fascinated by the nearly forgotten mine and the prospect of finding a precious metal. The following February, he met the new owner of the mine, and after the shaft was pumped dry, he lowered himself down the hundred-foot shaft by rope and eventually found the veins of silver that had first attracted the Colonial-era miners. Rick disapproved, but he did it anyway. In 2009, Chris self-published a novel, The Silver Mine, a lightly fictionalized account of those halcyon days, minus the bad parts.5
Rick and his teenage helpers traveled far and wide to collect the minerals that went into the boxed sets or were sold to retail rock shops. It was like playing nature’s own lottery, searching for free treasure and having teenage boy fun while doing it. They went up to Bancroft, Ontario, to collect purple lepidolite and down to Calvert Cliffs along Chesapeake Bay for fossils. Some of the collecting was done in Lancaster County. They found amethysts in a stream near Strasburg and goethite crystals in a farmer’s field near Columbia after a rainstorm. In Chester County, some forty miles from Lancaster, Rick knew a secret place to gather blue quartz. Retail buyers would press Rick for the locations where he collected these fine specimens, but he put them off, giving them different, not-as-good places to hunt. He was good at keeping secrets.6
In the Cedar Hill Quarry near the Maryland border, which he knew from a paper he wrote while a student at Franklin & Marshall, Rick found two blue minerals (dubbed “Blue One” and “Blue Two”) that appeared to be unlike any known to science. He began the process of obtaining recognition for his discoveries, one of which he intended to call Haefnerite. This required him to analyze and then synthesize the minerals, which involved growing crystals in the laboratory. He did this in the geology laboratories at Penn State, where he was still welcome, of course, despite Dean Hosler’s concerns. He took Chris along, as he h
ad taken other boys before him, and introduced him to Lauren Wright and his other old professors. But before he could complete his research and proof of discovery, he was beaten to the punch by Japanese geologists who had found Blue Two and worked harder to prove it was unique. They named it Nakauriite. Blue One was eventually named McGuinnessite in honor of the collector in California who had first discovered it. Rick sputtered in helpless fury, certain he had found Blue Two first, but there was nothing he could do. As Chris remembered it, his cousin was involved in many things and did not spend enough time in the laboratory to prove his find.7
“It wasn’t just like he lives in a house and goes to a job,” Chris Haefner said of Rick. “He had an interesting life. There were things happening in his life, and especially if you liked rocks and gems and minerals and fossils and the outdoors and all that. It was a great life. And he would pay your way for everything. You never had to spend a dime. He spent thousands of dollars on me and my brother, and everybody. Probably tens of thousands on the kids he was sexually involved with.”8
Rick’s urge to have sex with boys seemed to grow ever stronger after leaving Penn State. He finally turned to Chris, his own cousin. It was in the late spring of 1975, probably in May or June, after Rick had returned from the College of Charleston for the summer. His mother had warned Chris of rumors about Rick’s behavior with another neighbor boy, but he had brushed her off, not willing to see his hero tarnished. He did notice that his cousin liked to rub the shoulders of the boys who worked for him, but he passed it off as an affectionate gesture. The inevitable finally occurred when he and Rick and another boy were on a collecting trip to Plum Point, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay. They were staying in a motel, and it was Chris’s turn to share the bed with Rick. Just as with Dave S., and no doubt with the boys in Ocean City in 1965, Rick’s hand crept over and grabbed his crotch. Chris flinched and turned away, then sweated in terror the rest of the night. Rick did not try again, nor did he speak of it. “It was horrible,” Chris said.9
In subsequent days, Chris began to distance himself from his cousin. “That ruined everything for me with him,” Chris said. Yet he did not break away entirely, or really much at all, when you came right down to it. Chris was unwilling to give up the good parts of his relationship with Rick, or the money he received, and continued to go to the rock shop to work on the boxed sets with the other boys in the family Rick had created for himself. Chris found Rick’s world too interesting to leave. It was the classic victim response to the pedophile who had groomed him. Asked if he was ever frightened of Rick, Chris said he was scared only that he would try to molest him again. Yet he never really forgave Rick, and as he grew older, what had happened weighed on him ever more.10
If one boy rejected Rick, he moved on to others. On June 30, 1975, he hired two more boys, Kevin S. Burkey, twelve, and Randy K., fourteen, to work in the rock shop, the first act in a long-running tragedy that would handcuff these youths to Haefner for many years. The Burkey family had lived a few doors down from the Haefners on Nevin Street until around 1974, when the parents had split up, and Kevin now lived with his father near St. Mary’s Cemetery on the east side of Lancaster, almost two miles away. Randy K. lived in the same neighborhood as Burkey. Rick would claim he fired Burkey for incompetence and attitude three days later and that the molestation complaints were pure retaliation, but the Lancaster police didn’t believe him. Indeed, they accused him of molesting the twelve-year-old during the first week of July 1975 in another garage he rented along an alley, just east of the 300 block of Nevin Street. Rick likely took him to the garage, one of three he rented to store mineral specimens, on the pretext of work. He partially undressed Kevin and then rubbed him with Bismoline Medicated Powder, a brand of talcum powder made in Lancaster. Then he performed oral sex, police said. Burkey kept quiet for more than a month, confused and embarrassed about what had happened. He told no one. Not until Randy K. was molested around August 11, during one of Rick’s out-of-town collecting and camping trips, did he come forward.11
Randy must have told his parents upon returning home that night. Upon hearing what had happened, Kevin then told his older brother, Jimmy, what Rick had done to him. Jimmy urged Kevin to tell their mother, who went straight to the police and filed a complaint. Police records, the few that still exist (more on this in a later chapter), show the complaints were filed on August 12, 1975, and that Haefner was arrested on August 15 and charged with two counts of corrupting the morals of a minor and one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. These acts went beyond the groping to which other boys had been subjected.12
The Lancaster police and county prosecutors would not always comport themselves well during the subsequent investigation and trial, bending the rules in an attempt to get the result they so desperately wanted. They probably knew to some extent about the previous accusations against Rick, dating back more than ten years, and saw it as their duty to get him off the street and into prison. Had they succeeded, other boys would have been spared Rick’s sexual predations, and his involvement in the Betsy Aardsma murder might well have come to light decades earlier. As it was, their tactics sometimes crossed the line. So did those of Rick. It was a deadly serious battle of wits. Rick was a monster, but he was a smart monster, and he could and did bite back.
Detectives Jerry P. Crump and Edward H. Smith came to 217 Nevin Street around noon on Friday, August 15, and asked Rick to accompany them to the police station to answer questions. They said they wanted to question him away from his mother. Rick initially refused, but went along after the officers threatened to arrest him. At the station, the detectives interrogated him at length, asking, for example, if he had ever been alone with the boys or touched them below the waist. He insisted he had not but acknowledged taking Randy K. camping overnight that week. They took him to another room in the station where he was photographed and fingerprinted. His shoes, belt, watch, and wallet were taken from him, and he was patted down for weapons. Rick asked if he was being charged with something. He received no answer but was placed in a holding cell. It was his first time behind bars, but it seems to have done little to reduce his sense of self-importance and arrogance. It is a fair assumption that Haefner was scared, and soon would be even more so.13
Around 3:00 p.m., Crump and Smith removed Rick from the cell and took him to the evidence room, where he saw brass knuckles and knives on a table. Rick claimed in 1981, in a remarkable complaint to the FBI about his arrest and prosecution for the child sex offenses, that one of the officers stood in the corner with his back turned. The other shook his fist at him and told him the parents of Burkey and Randy K. were very angry, and that if Rick had molested his child, he would have “beat the living shit” out of him. According to Rick, the officer told him he “could get hurt in this room.” The other officer then turned around and continued the interrogation. He told Haefner that the only way to clear this up was to take a polygraph test. Rick agreed, fearing physical harm if he refused. He also would claim that the detectives had promised to free him if he passed the lie detector test.
Around 4:00 p.m., they took him to the polygraph room and the operator hooked him up to the machine. The operator supposedly told him he passed, although we have only Haefner’s word for this. Afterward, Crump and Smith did not release him, returning him to his cell. He asked one of the officers if he would be charged, and his response was that he was “doing the paperwork.” Around 9:45 p.m., he was taken from the cell to another room, where he talked to Crump and Smith about the lie detector test. Rick reminded them of their agreement to free him if he passed the test. They denied there was any such agreement and took him to night court for arraignment at 10:00 p.m.14
George and Ere Haefner, after consulting with George’s brother, Henry Haefner, who was a lawyer in Lancaster, hired James F. Heinly, a prominent Lancaster criminal defense attorney, to represent their son. Heinly met with Rick at the district magistrate’s courtroom and reviewed the ch
arges against him. His uncle Henry the lawyer was there, too. Rick waived a formal arraignment, which meant among other things that the charges did not have to be read in open court. He signed the waiver form, “Richard Haefner, PhD.” Rick thought the PhD honorific set him above other men, but it is doubtful the police even gave it a second glance. Increasingly, Rick would cling to that honorific like a talisman, demanding with no small amount of arrogance to be referred to as Doctor Richard Haefner. Rick’s parents put up their house for his $12,000 bail, and he was released around 11:00 p.m. He went home to the only house he would ever truly call home, to his rear second-floor bedroom at 217 Nevin Street.15
Did the Lancaster police violate Rick’s rights? Did they break an “agreement” to free him if he passed a lie detector test? It seems obvious that Crump and Smith had legitimate reasons to arrest Rick that day. The questioning, even as related by Rick in his own, highly subjective account, does not seem to have been out of bounds. As far as the implied threats of violence, police interrogators have always used psychological tricks against suspects, and even in Rick’s one-sided account, they did not actually hit him.
As far as the supposed agreement to free him if he passed the polygraph test, it seems doubtful Crump and Smith would have agreed to this, especially knowing as they did the limitations of the test. Polygraphs can sometimes be beaten, especially by intelligent psychopaths firmly believing they did nothing wrong. It is up to the police how much credence to give the results, which in any case cannot be introduced in a court proceeding. When Larry Paul Maurer passed his polygraph examination during the hot phase of the Aardsma investigation in early 1970, he was allowed by the Pennsylvania State Police to go on his way. Whatever the results were of Haefner’s polygraph exam, the Lancaster police were not convinced of his innocence, based on what the boys told them. And they may well have been aware of the previous molestation accusations against Rick and not given him the benefit of doubt. Perhaps they said something vague to get him to agree to the test, or perhaps they intentionally deceived him. In the end, it didn’t matter.