by David DeKok
Beginning in January 1974, when Rick was still teaching at SUNY–New Paltz, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County approached him about becoming their next curator of Mineralogy-Geology. The man dangling this plum and potentially lifetime job was Theodore Downs, chief curator of the Earth Sciences Division and a giant in his field. Downs was best known for overseeing the spectacular fossil finds in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, and for founding the Page Museum in 1962 to house the reconstructed dinosaur skeletons and other finds from the pits. Haefner was coy at first, but after more entreaties from Downs, finally applied for the job in June 1975, less than a month before the incident involving Kevin Burkey. There followed the usual round of interviews. On November 26, 1975, Downs phoned Haefner to offer him the job, and Rick immediately accepted. Downs then sent a letter putting the offer in writing on November 28, six years to the date after Betsy Aardsma’s murder. Rick had also agreed to Downs’s request to teach geology at UCLA and do research part time.4
By that time, of course, Haefner was out on bail from his arrest on the child molestation charges of August 15, 1975, and was five days away from his second preliminary hearing. He knew, or should have known, that he was going to trial in a few weeks. Yet somehow, he forgot to mention any of this to Downs. This may have been his psychopathic belief that he had done nothing wrong, or perhaps it was pure calculation, reasoning that since Downs had no effective access to the Lancaster newspapers in Los Angeles, he wouldn’t find out. Perhaps it was a little of both. And of course, Rick expected to be fully exonerated, after which his problems would go away. He didn’t seem to understand that in the eyes of society, an arrest for child molestation was nearly as damning as a conviction—that the taint could almost never be fully erased. We also see here, once again, Haefner’s ability to compartmentalize his life, packing away on a shelf the trauma of facing trial on child molestation charges.
The new job was not intended to start until March 1, 1976. But in the interim, Downs gave Rick several projects to complete, including leading the search for his own assistant, reviewing the plans and blueprints for a new gem and mineral hall being built at the museum, including a high-security gem vault, and visiting gem shows in the Mid-Atlantic states to search for specimens for the museum. Rick may have reasoned foolishly that he could do all of that while out on bail without Downs ever being the wiser.5
It was the contempt sentence and immediate jailing that spoiled his calculations. Representing the museum, Haefner was supposed to give a talk at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show on February 15, 1976, a night when he was still sitting in his orange jumpsuit in his cell in Lancaster County Prison. He had not been allowed by prison officials to make a phone call to museum officials to let them know he had been unavoidably detained and could not make the speech.
This was no ordinary rock show he missed. Tucson was, and still is, one of the premier gem and mineral shows in the world, held annually since 1955 and attracting visitors and professionals from many countries. Most big museums with gem, mineral, or fossil collections sent representatives. Marion Stuart, a member of the Natural History Museum’s board, hosted an annual dinner at the show, and it was probably this dinner at which Rick was expected to speak. Not only was Stuart an influential member of the museum board and the museum foundation, but her philanthropy was also paying for the new gem and mineral hall that would be Rick’s domain once he became curator. The hall would be named the E. Hadley Stuart Jr. Hall of Gems and Minerals after her husband, whose family had founded, and at that time still owned, Carnation, the food products company. We can only imagine her annoyance when Haefner, the geologist who would be in charge of the glittering new wing, neither showed up at the dinner nor called.6
During the rock show, Stuart learned of his arrest for allegedly molesting the two boys in Lancaster. Who told her is unknown, but one suspects that someone broke the news to her after Rick failed to appear for the dinner. She then told Los Angeles museum officials that Rick was morally unfit for the curator job and should not be hired. On February 17, 1976, a letter went to Rick from the museum informing him that he was no longer being considered for the curator position. No explanation was given, but seeking to smooth the waters, Haefner was allegedly told verbally after the letter arrived that he would be considered for other significant employment at the museum. We have only Rick’s word on that, but it is what he believed. Downs soon reached out to another candidate, Peter J. Dunn at the Smithsonian, telling him that Haefner “was dishonest” and had deceived him by not informing him that he had been arrested for sex crimes involving children. He told Dunn, who did not take the job, that the offer to Haefner had been withdrawn. Metaphorically at least, they had locked the door of the museum and thrown him into the La Brea Tar Pits.7
Rick was as devastated and bitter as anyone who loses a dream job he thought was his. Being a museum curator or director had been a lifelong dream for him. He had talked about it to Joe Head, his field assistant during his Penn State research in Death Valley in 1967. He had worked at the North Museum on the Franklin & Marshall College campus, a short walk from his home in Lancaster, from an early age. That was where he had gotten to know Dr. John Price, the museum curator who had been one of the character witnesses at his trial. Price would conceive of new exhibits and, at least when Rick was in college, would give him the responsibility of designing and then building the exhibit, helped by high school students employed by the hour.8
Officially, he had no idea the job offer was withdrawn because of his child sex arrest and assumed it was because he was sitting in prison and couldn’t give the speech. He poured out his tale of woe to Sprague, and a tiny bit of it made its way into the Philadelphia Inquirer article. Rick added the Natural History Museum to his enemies list, biding his time until he could strike back. How could they promise him the job in writing in November and then withdraw the offer in February without even so much as a partial explanation? But part of him also hoped they were telling the truth about hiring him if another curator job opened up.9
Sprague’s job as Rick’s new lawyer was to stop a retrial, but also to prepare in the event he lost that fight. Chris Haefner remembers accompanying Rick to Sprague’s ornate Philadelphia office three or four times to prepare his own testimony. He marveled at a beautiful fireplace mantel that Rick told him was made of serpentine, a dark green mineral that was mottled like a snake’s skin.
One of Rick’s friends, Terry Lee Hess, had come forward with a claim that during the trial, he had been in a courthouse men’s room and overheard Detective Jerry P. Crump offering a bribe to Randy K. to testify as a rebuttal witness in a way that would help to convict Haefner. The story was problematic for a number of reasons—first, because Randy K.’s case had been separated from Burkey’s before the trial started, and second, because of how Hess claimed to have observed them. If police were bribing witnesses, what point did they have in bribing Randy K. when Judge Appel had barred any testimony about Rick’s alleged assault on the boy? But it was the second problem that proved more serious. Hess claimed to have heard Crump and Randy K. talking about the bribe in the restroom, but also to have seen them reflected in the mirror over the sink.
A suppression of evidence hearing had been held on March 10–11, 1976, highlighted by testimony from Hess about the alleged bribe. On May 3, Lancaster police arrested Hess and charged him with perjury, in part because a college physics professor brought in as an expert witness concluded that Hess could not have seen the mirror reflections of the detective and boy. The arrest created a problem for Sprague, because if Hess feared anything he said in court could be used against him in the perjury case, he would probably refuse to testify. In October 1976, Haefner hired Sprague to represent Hess, and the perjury charge was eventually dismissed.10 The retrial was scheduled to begin May 19.
As the second trial approached, Sprague filed motions seeking a suspension of the proceedings against Haefner until the Hess case wa
s resolved. He also petitioned for a change of venue and suppression of some of the evidence. Sprague demanded court-ordered psychiatric testing of Kevin Burkey, accusing him of having made false accusations in the past about homosexual activities. Sprague was doing what any lawyer would do to defend his client, but that was scant comfort to the alleged victims.11
After analyzing Haefner’s case, Sprague believed that invoking double jeopardy might stop a retrial altogether. The concept of double jeopardy—that no one shall twice be put in jeopardy of life or limb for the same offense—is found in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted by Congress as part of the Bill of Rights in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791. The framers of the Constitution drew the right from English common law. But until 1969 and the US Supreme Court ruling in Benton v. Maryland, double jeopardy protection was guaranteed only in federal courts for federal crimes, such as bank robbery, kidnapping, and counterfeiting. Many states, including Pennsylvania, had double jeopardy clauses in their state constitutions, but they typically applied only to death penalty cases. The Benton ruling in 1969 applied the protection against double jeopardy to all criminal proceedings in all courts, federal and state, eliminating the requirement that “life or limb” be threatened. Prosecutors could not try a defendant twice for the same offense, no matter what it was.
But with mistrials, it got tricky. Some mistrials triggered double jeopardy protection and some did not. Sprague set out to show that Judge Appel should not have declared a mistrial after only eight hours—that he should have required the jury to deliberate longer, even put them up for the night (they were not sequestered) and bring them back the next morning to try again. The fact that he did not, Sprague argued, made a retrial a violation of Haefner’s right not to be tried twice for the same offense. Judge Appel’s declaration of a mistrial was, in effect, a directed verdict of acquittal. The juror Richard Peters scoffed at the idea that Appel didn’t try hard enough, remembering considerable pressure from the judge to bring back a verdict. But Sprague and his associates had studied the case law carefully.12
At a proceeding in Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas on May 19, 1976, which was packed with local lawyers hoping to see their famous Philadelphia colleague in action, Sprague persuaded Judge Wilson Bucher that Haefner’s retrial should be postponed at least until September to deal with pretrial motions, especially his demand that a retrial be barred entirely on double jeopardy grounds. Prosecutor Kenneff argued that Judge Appel had been within his rights to declare a mistrial when he did, but Judge Bucher granted Sprague’s request and reserved a full discussion of double jeopardy for early in June. Possibly reacting to the Time magazine article in which Sprague mentioned the case, he ordered both sides not to make public statements.13
In his brief on the double jeopardy issue on June 2, Sprague argued that a judge cannot declare a mistrial unless the defendant gives consent, an exception being if there is an instance of “manifest necessity” requiring discharge of the jury over defense objections. He cited a number of appellate decisions.14
Kenneff, in his own brief, argued that Appel had declared a mistrial over the objections of the prosecution, and that defense counsel James F. Heinly had, in fact, urged the judge to do so. He further argued that the jury was not split over issues of law or fact, but over whom to believe, Rick Haefner or Kevin Burkey. Moreover, Kenneff said, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled in Commonwealth v. Campbell (1971) that it was up to the judge to determine how long of a jury deliberation was enough.15
Judge Wilson Bucher sided with the prosecution, ruling on June 25, 1976, that Judge Appel’s declaration of a mistrial had been prudent and not premature. The decision meant that Haefner would be retried in September. Two weeks later, Sprague began a round of appeals. He lost in the state Superior Court but won in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. On June 3, 1977, the state high court sent the appeal back to superior court for decision. That court heard arguments on December 6, 1977, and more than two years later ruled that retrying Haefner would be double jeopardy and ordered him released.16
Rick had been free since his release from the contempt sentence three years earlier. Now he no longer had to worry about the sex charges, and his parents were released from their $12,000 bail obligation. Nor did he have to worry about the contempt sentence, since the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled long ago that he should not have been charged and jailed by Judge Appel. Indeed, they called the whole contempt affair “preposterous.” Rick proclaimed forever after that he had been “exonerated” of the sex charges, which wasn’t true at all. Thanks to employing Sprague and his associates, who seemed vastly more skilled than the county judge and prosecutor, he was indeed a free man. He had gotten off, beaten the rap. But no one who looks at the case today with an open mind would agree that he was actually innocent, as he claimed. Just damned lucky. Or perhaps damned and lucky, depending on one’s perspective.17
There was a postscript to Rick’s victory. Beating the rap was not enough for him. He was upset that the stain of the child molestation arrests seemed permanent. He applied for jobs at other museums, hoping to find one who hadn’t heard he was a pedophile, or about the debacle in Los Angeles. But it was a small world he had sullied, and they all knew, even in the years before the Internet exposed a man’s life to easy scrutiny. It didn’t matter that Rick had been, as he put it, “exonerated” of the charges. Boards would not take the chance of putting a man with that kind of arrest record in charge of museums that by their very nature drew large numbers of boys among their visitors. There was no way you could explain someone like Rick Haefner to the public, especially at a time, the mid-1970s, when public attitudes in America were returning to the old view that child molesters should be harshly punished, not understood. He had many of the qualifications of a good museum curator or director, but it just didn’t matter.
Penn State geology professor Roger Cuffey, Rick’s most ardent defender, said the rumors about his arrest and trial in Lancaster would get reported secretly to museum hiring committees, who would then drop him from consideration. Cuffey, who had served on hiring committees at Penn State, said mere arrests are not supposed to be considered in evaluating job searches, only criminal convictions. “In my letters of recommendation for him, I tried to counter these prejudices, but hiring committees then were among the most cowardly in the world—the merest whiff of anything scandalous and they’d cut off possibilities, no matter how good the student was,” he said. He remembered running into Rick at a professional meeting in the mid-1970s and asking him how the job search was going. “He said, ‘Same as always; they all find out about things.’ ”18
Rick became convinced that if he could make the records disappear, his troubles finding a museum or university job would also vanish. So with Sprague once again as his champion, Rick set out to rewrite history. In a petition to expunge Haefner’s criminal record filed in the Common Pleas Court of Lancaster County on August 9, 1979, Sprague described his client as “an individual of unblemished reputation, never before having been arrested or criminally prosecuted in his life.” This meant before the Lancaster arrests in 1975. Sprague clearly didn’t know about the molestation accusations from the early to mid-1960s, for which Rick had managed to avoid arrest, or else disbelieved or discounted the stories. He asked the court to order the Lancaster chief of police to destroy Haefner’s fingerprints and photographs, to remove the record of his arrest from departmental files, and to ask the FBI and state police to return any records forwarded to them. They should be destroyed, too. Moreover, Sprague asked that the deputy court administrator in Lancaster County be ordered to remove all references to the arrest from the dockets and indexes of the Court of Common Pleas and the district magistrate.19
Rick testified at a subsequent hearing that the arrest record had damaged his reputation and made it impossible for him to get a teaching or museum job. He swore to the court that he was actually innocent of the molestation charges
but provided no evidence to back up his claim, which Judge Paul A. Mueller Jr. noted with disapproval. Surprisingly, prosecutor John A. Kenneff Jr. did not attend the hearing, telling the court he was neutral on the petition and would leave it up to the court’s discretion. It was a remarkable move, almost as if he was running up the white flag in the face of Sprague’s legal blitzkrieg.
But Judge Mueller wasn’t convinced. He based his opinion on a Superior Court decision two years earlier, Commonwealth v. Mueller (no relation), in which the expungement decision hinged on whether the prosecutor had made a prima facie (on the face of it) case against the defendant. In the Haefner case, he said, the prosecution had made a prima facie case—at his trial. The subsequent mistrial, he said, established neither guilt nor innocence. So the record could not be expunged until Haefner disproved the prosecution’s prima facie case at another hearing. He criticized Haefner for presenting no evidence to rebut the Burkey charges and said his personal declaration of innocence was not enough. It was different in the Randy K. case, which had never been brought to trial and which had just been nolle prossed, or dismissed as unwinnable by the prosecution. Judge Mueller denied Haefner’s petition to expunge the Burkey records, but approved destruction of the Randy K. file. He gave the police and court record-keepers four months to comply.20
At the police and courthouse level, there were few illusions about Haefner’s innocence. Rick sent a letter to Judge Mueller on October 8, 1980, complaining that nothing had been done about destroying the Randy K. records. Meanwhile, Sprague appealed Judge Mueller’s decision on the Burkey records to Superior Court, and on October 30, 1981, they won. Judge John P. Hester, writing for the majority, saw the situation quite differently than Mueller had. In his view, the mistrial had proven that the prosecution had failed to convince a jury of Rick’s guilt (although it had deadlocked eleven to one for conviction, which Hester didn’t know). So that didn’t create a prima facie case. Compounding the matter, he said, the prosecution had failed to present any evidence at the hearing in favor of preserving the record. Hester then extolled Haefner’s testimony in favor of expungement and indicated that he didn’t care that Rick presented no evidence to back up his claim of innocence. Hester directed Judge Mueller to order the destruction of the records.21