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

by David DeKok

  The next day, both the morning and afternoon Lancaster newspapers ran news briefs about his arrest. The story in the morning Intelligencer Journal was placed among the obituaries, a fitting choice for something that ought to have doomed him to a life of scorn and obloquy. But for Rick Haefner, it instead marked a new beginning. His dream of a legitimate career in geology or as a museum curator was over, although he did not know this yet. His new career as a menace to society would continue until his death. Rick Haefner had killed Betsy Aardsma. He had sexually molested any number of young boys. And now those two roads to Hell were about to merge.16

  Chapter 27

  Kill Me the Way You Killed Her

  Ere J. Haefner was sixty-three years old in the summer of 1975, a diminutive, stern, overbearing mother who had raised two well-educated sons. Her eldest, George P. Haefner Jr., was a successful aerospace engineer in California who seemed to have lived a relatively trouble-free life. Her other son, Rick, had many problems, but she ignored or disbelieved them. Ere worshipped both of them, but especially Rick, her golden boy. He was the distinguished Doctor Haefner, and if the world did not recognize his genius, his superman status, they were fools. Ere would have done anything for him, anything at all. Appearances, not morality, were everything to her. So when Rick was arrested on August 15, 1975, and charged with molesting the two boys, her world fell apart. How could he be so stupid?

  On Saturday, August 16, Ere was agitated because of what had happened to her son, but even more so because of the small article about Rick’s arrest in the morning Intelligencer Journal newspaper. After the story appeared, Rick began receiving obscene telephone calls at home, some twenty-eight in all, he would later claim. No doubt Ere answered some of those calls. When the afternoon New Era arrived—she took both editions—Ere saw the story again and erupted in anger and frustration. Looking out the kitchen window, Ere saw Rick emerge from the rock shop into the alley, where he was blithely attending to his rock boxes as if nothing had happened. She stormed outside to confront him.1

  Her husband and Rick’s father, George P. Haefner Sr., who was sixty-seven years old, was absent from this drama, although we can imagine he must have been as upset as his volatile wife. Chris Haefner described George Sr. as an honest man of integrity, although he seems to have taken no more action than his wife did to rein in Rick. Chris argues that Rick’s father knew nothing of his dark side, even if that is hard to accept. Mostly retired, he sometimes helped his son in the rock shop and occasionally conducted fire insurance inspections. He had been an independent insurance agent for many years. For whatever reason, he wasn’t home that afternoon. This drama directly involved only Rick and his mother, but it was overheard and observed by Chris Haefner, who was gluing rock samples for the boxed sets inside the building a few feet away.2

  Chris was unaware that his cousin had been arrested the previous day. He had arrived after lunch and gone straight to work, as he often did on weekends. He did not see Ere before he began cracking rocks, but he did see Rick. And then he saw Ere go after Rick. Out of control with anger, she backed her son into an outside corner of the garage and began to scream at him. Chris heard every word. “She was saying, ‘You did this again! Why did you do this again?’ She accused him of having killed some girl at Penn State, in a way that [made it obvious] he had admitted it to her back then. And she was very clear about that. ‘You got out of that,’ Ere screamed. ‘And now, here you are doing this [breaking the law] again. You might as well have killed me the way you killed her.’ ” Chris, who was fifteen at the time, said it was “very, very clear” to him that Ere was saying that Rick had once murdered a girl at Penn State and then confessed to her. Betsy’s name was not mentioned during the argument. She was always “that girl.” But no girl other than Betsy Aardsma had been murdered at Penn State since 1940, three years before Rick was born.3

  Rick did not deny his mother’s accusation about the murder, or even try to defend himself. He listened for two or three minutes, then ushered her back into the house. Then he went back to the rock shop, but he couldn’t work. He didn’t say anything to Chris, just paced the floor for what seemed like minutes before abruptly leaving and walking back to the house. The kitchen window, which had a screen, was open, and Chris heard everything. In a fury, Rick laid into Ere, telling her she should never have said those things out in the alley. Chris was in the rock shop and heard her, Rick said. He was showing the side of himself that women who angered him would see throughout his life. In a frightened, timid voice, she confessed she hadn’t known Chris was there. And then the confrontation ended as quickly as it had begun. Rick came back to the garage and still seemed angry. Chris assumed he was angry toward him for having overheard the conversation. But Rick said nothing.4

  Aunt Ere did not treat Chris differently after the alley incident, going completely silent on what had happened. “My world with her was about chocolate cake, and did I want chocolate milk, did I want hot dogs or hamburgers for my lunch. No, she never spoke with me.” Nor did Chris tell his parents or priest what had happened. It had been a bad moment, and he wanted to put it behind him. Chris, at fifteen, was worried about keeping his job at the rock shop and the money that came with it. “None of this meant anything to me,” he said. “My whole life was about protecting what was mine.” Was Ere telling the truth when she accused Rick of murder? Chris didn’t know. Maybe it was just one of the crazy things adults did. So he shrugged it off, or tried to.5

  Rick saw the danger, and for several weeks after the August 16 incident, sought to pull Chris back into his camp. Chris believes he was worried that Detective Jerry P. Crump, the young Lancaster police officer in charge of the molestation investigation, would come nosing around and begin talking to Haefner family members. Rick had to have feared that Chris would tell Crump what he’d heard Ere say that day. He also wanted Chris on his side for the molestation trial if they could not get the charges dismissed. So he tried to make Chris believe that he had not heard what he thought he heard—that Rick was guilty of the murder of a female student at Penn State University.6

  One day that fall, Rick invited Chris to accompany him on a collecting trip. Their destination was a farmer’s field in western Lancaster County, not far from Columbia, where they could find goethite crystals. They drove up Indian Head Road, stopping before it began snaking up the mountain. If you went all the way to the top, it was possible to look down on the old Columbia drive-in theater, Chris remembered. They parked the car and began their search.

  Before too long, Rick began talking about what Ere had said that day in August. He was nervous, and his hands were in his pockets. “You know, I know who did it,” Rick said. Chris asked him what he meant. “You know, what happened in the garage when your aunt came out and [talked] about that girl that was killed,” Rick said. “I know who did it, and that’s why she’s all upset. I told her about it.”

  This was not exactly a confession, if you took him at face value: Rick was saying he knew who had killed the coed, and it wasn’t him. It all happened a long time ago, he said, when he was in graduate school at Penn State. Chris “shouldn’t worry about it.” Why his mother had brought it up that day, he had no idea. Rick said his mother believed he was going to get in trouble for knowing who killed the girl, meaning Betsy Aardsma. He didn’t tell Chris who killed the girl, just that it wasn’t him. Someone was with him at Pattee Library that day. He was trying to shift the blame for Betsy’s murder to someone else. He wasn’t the killer. But, according to Chris, that wasn’t what his mother had been screaming at him in the alley.7

  A few days later, when they were back in the garage and working on the boxed sets, Rick again began talking about the girl who was killed at Penn State. He told Chris that the dead girl was not who people thought she was. She wasn’t a big deal, Rick said, and she was never going to be anybody. All that she was trying to do at the school was get with a guy, to have a life, and that’s why girls
went to college. To Rick, she was no different than any other college coed. “He was pretty much downplaying the relevance of her as a person, saying that she was really not important,” Chris said.8

  These were astonishing statements. Rick sounded exactly like a bitter, rejected suitor who had been thrown over—although his status with Betsy was entirely in his mind—for a medical student, meaning David L. Wright. Chris spent many hours working in the rock shop that fall, in part because Rick needed the help now that Kevin Burkey and Randy K. were no longer working for him. One wonders whether other parents stopped their sons from working at the shop in the wake of Rick’s arrest. Chris says all his friends knew about the arrest and some were already teasing him about it the night of Aunt Ere’s outburst.9

  It was later in the fall of 1975 that Rick began to voice chilling, Charles Manson–like soliloquies on the unimportance of individual life. He told Chris that God does not look upon the death of one person as such a bad thing. After all, when Cain killed Abel, God didn’t kill Cain. He put a mark on him as a murderer. And so what if someone is killed by a latter-day Cain? Or, as Chris remembered it: “We were all going to die—you’re going to die, I’m going to die, everyone’s going to die—and everybody makes too big of a deal about it. So if we’re all going to die, and God intended this plan of death upon everybody, then what’s the big deal?” Rick could have been Charlie Manson preaching to the other Family members around a fire at the Barker Ranch, deep in Death Valley in the fall of 1968. Perhaps he had spent a night with the Family during the fall of 1968—or perhaps he had merely heard of Manson and read the recently published (1974) book, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry. Either way, it was warped and twisted, the product of a psychopath’s mind. 10

  Chris, who accepts that Rick killed Betsy, believes his cousin’s attitude toward death was why he could live with himself after the murder and not be wracked by guilt. In Rick’s view, what he had done with his knife was merely to hasten the inevitable end of Betsy’s life.11

  Chapter 28

  Miscarriage of Justice

  During the five months between his arrest on molestation charges in the summer of 1975 and the start of his trial, Rick Haefner could not simply sit back and let his attorney, James F. Heinly, handle all the preparations. That would not do for Doctor Richard Haefner, as he had begun to insist that people call him. He set out on his own to gather incriminating evidence against the two boys who had leveled the accusations against him and caused his arrest.1

  He rigged one of his older cars with a tape recorder, concealing it in the back of the passenger-side front seat. Then he instructed two of the older teens among his growing posse of fanboy followers, Steve Groff and Willie Bise, how to use it. Their job was to drive twelve-year-old Kevin Burkey around and record any incriminating statements he might make, ideally a confession that he made up the whole thing. Bise, the only black among Rick’s followers, thought Rick was cool. When the tape recorder in the seat didn’t function properly, Bise concealed it on his person. They made many tapes of Burkey talking in the car. “I think there was something in there, because he did have the lawyers listen to them,” Bise remembered.2

  Whatever they contained, the tapes would have been inadmissible in court because they violated the Pennsylvania wiretapping law, which, like similar laws in some other states, outlaws secret taping. “I’m not sure what came of it, because I was just a pawn,” Bise said. “I was just out there getting them to talk, and I’m not sure what they said because I was just having fun.” He thought it was possible that Rick was guilty of child molestation because of the way he messed around. By that, he said he meant that Rick was much friendlier to the younger boys, like Kevin Burkey, than the older ones, like himself. “I never seen him doing it, so I can’t judge him on that,” Bise said. “He never tried anything with me.”3

  Haefner pursued other measures against the two boys. In his complaint to the FBI in 1981, he says he went to Lincoln Junior High School in Lancaster, where one of the boys was a student, and demanded information about him from the school principal, who notified the police. The police, in turn, threatened to arrest Rick for harassment if he ever returned to the school or tried to speak to the principal again. Haefner would cite this incident as an example of police harassment of him, which suggests he didn’t know or care how his actions might be perceived by the public.4

  Rick’s brother, George P. Haefner Jr., a thirty-seven-year-old electrical engineer, arrived from California in early October to help with his brother’s defense. Almost immediately, George ran into trouble with the Lancaster police. On October 6, 1975, he was walking in downtown Lancaster not far from the police station when he was confronted by two plainclothes officers who asked him to show some ID. He told them he would not do so unless he had an attorney present. There was a scuffle and George was arrested. He was held for about four hours and was eventually told that the officers thought he looked like a forgery suspect they had been watching for. He was charged with disorderly conduct, a summary offense carrying a $10 fine and $11 in court costs. George fought it at the district magistrate level, lost, then appealed to the Common Pleas Court, where he lost again. The judge, annoyed, raised the fine to $25 and the costs to $62.50. No one ever accused the well-educated Haefner brothers of having much common sense. The family was circling the wagons, not urging Heinly to cut a deal to get Rick out of a jail term. Or urging Rick to get professional help, for that matter.5

  It is possible that George had come to Lancaster with a check to help pay for Rick’s defense. In 1996, he told the FBI that he had loaned his brother $10,000 back then, the equivalent of about $43,000 in today’s money. More than twenty years later, George thought he had loaned the money in 1972 or 1973. But it is hard to imagine that Rick would have needed that big of a loan in those years, when he was living at home or teaching at SUNY–New Paltz and living in a motel. Was he contemplating fleeing the country if the investigation of Betsy’s murder came too close and he needed money to start a new life? That didn’t happen, of course. It seems more likely that the loan was actually made in 1975 and used to pay Heinly. Rick’s parents were not wealthy, and their house was already encumbered for the $12,000 bail. More than twenty years later, the loan from George had still not been repaid by Rick.6

  A preliminary hearing on the molestation charges was held on November 7 and continued on December 3, 1975. After he was ordered to stand trial, Rick’s court date was scheduled for the last week in January in 1976. Heinly petitioned the Lancaster County court to separate the charges related to Randy K.’s complaint and to try those later. He argued that the Randy K. and Burkey incidents were unrelated, arose from different events, and had occurred more than a month apart. Judge Anthony R. Appel agreed. He barred testimony relating to Randy K., only later conceding that this posed a problem, since Burkey had come forward only after hearing from Randy K. about Rick’s actions on the camping trip. This freed Heinly to mount an attack on the credibility of Kevin Burkey, who was the more problematic and less sympathetic of the two boys. Burkey died in 2011 at age forty-seven, before he could be interviewed for this book.7

  The emotional pressure of Rick’s impending trial took its toll on his mother, Ere Haefner. Her carefully constructed world, her delusion of grandeur in which her son was a golden boy, a professor of geology admired by his peers, was falling to pieces—although she, like Rick, believed it to be the result of a conspiracy. It must have required a great deal of mental effort on her part to rationalize or dismiss everything her son had done, whether to Betsy Aardsma, to the boy at the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, the boys in Ocean City, or the two boys from his rock shop. For whatever reason—perhaps worrying that the stress of watching her son on trial would kill her, or contemplating suicide, or just coincidence—Ere went to lawyer Henry Haefner on January 25, a few days before Rick’s trial began, and wrote out her last will and testament
. She left everything to her husband, or if he was not alive, to George Jr. and Rick, divided equally.8

  Jury selection began on Tuesday, January 27, in the historic old county courthouse in downtown Lancaster, the same place where F&M student Edward L. Gibbs was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1950 for the murder of Marian Baker. Assistant District Attorney John A. Kenneff was the prosecutor. One of the people in the jury pool, Richard Peters, remembers being asked whether he had any children or was related to anyone in law enforcement. He answered “yes” to both questions. Peters had two sons, ages nine and eleven, and his brother was a state trooper. Despite that, he was picked for the jury. The jury was comprised of three women and nine men, all of them white.9

  The trial would hinge on the credibility of young Kevin Burkey. Peters recalls that the youth was visibly embarrassed at having to repeat the details of the sexual assault, dwelling at length on Rick rubbing him with Bismoline powder. “Then what happened?” prosecutor Kenneff asked. “He blew me,” the boy replied. Peters remembers Kevin as being a highly credible witness. “I was not prejudiced, I’m sure,” he said. “I tried very hard not to be.” But he had boys of his own and four brothers and did not believe a twelve-year-old would say such things in court if they were not true. “He would not do that,” Peters said. “Too embarrassing.”10