by David DeKok
Mueller complied with the order, but once again, court officials in Lancaster didn’t act. Six months later, Haefner went to the Clerk of Courts office with a notary public as witness and found a thick file of documents from the Burkey case still publicly available. He complained bitterly to the Clerk of Courts, but it did no good. A friend, Bob Freiler Sr., one of the people who visited him when he was in county prison on the contempt citation in 1976, went back a day later and found them still quite available. It is believed the records were not destroyed until around 1989, when Haefner submitted a new petition to the court.22
Chapter 30
Penn State Drops the Ball
Rick came to believe that his thesis advisor and most important professor, Lauren A. Wright, was not doing enough to help him get a museum job, and must have wondered if his arrest and trial on the molestation charges had anything to do with it. Wright would admit years later that Rick “was commonly in the company of younger boys, but those of us who knew him at the time didn’t think of the pedophile aspect here. He seemed to be interested in just encouraging young men to acquire an interest in natural history.” This seems a remarkably clueless attitude, especially given that Charles Hosler, the dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, had rejected Rick for that very reason when he applied to run the Penn State geology museum. Another interesting possibility is that Wright was indeed holding back on helping Rick, but because of the Betsy Aardsma murder, not the pedophilia. Regardless of which it was, Haefner’s anger grew and festered. At some point—probably in the late summer of 1976, after his legal problems began to disappear, thanks to Sprague’s brilliant lawyering—Rick went to Penn State to confront Lauren Wright.1
If Wright shut his eyes to the pedophilia, he harbored deep suspicions about Rick and the murder of Betsy Aardsma. He knew his old student regularly carried a homemade knife for protection. Yet he had remained silent about that, and about Rick’s strange visit to his house on the evening of November 28, 1969. He said nothing to Penn State officials in the seven years after Betsy was stabbed to death in Pattee Library, and certainly nothing to the state police, who were everywhere on campus in the wake of the murder. We will never know exactly what motivated him. Many have spoken about how he supposedly saw the best in everybody, but this doesn’t excuse his silence about Rick’s strange behavior that night. Not when the stakes were this high. Was there something in his personal life he feared Rick might disclose? Wright may simply have been following a long Penn State tradition of looking the other way, but he certainly knew his duty as a citizen, a duty that was not obviated by the hoary traditions of academia. His long silence begs the question of whether Rick knew something about Wright that the professor didn’t want anyone else to know. That is a question that cannot be answered now.
Rick’s visit in 1976 ended his silence, at least in part. We don’t know exactly what Haefner said, but it left Wright frightened. After he left, Wright went immediately to see Hosler, who had an open-door policy and allowed faculty to come in without an appointment if he wasn’t talking to someone else. Wright walked in and shut the door behind him. “Lauren was really fearful of him,” Hosler said. “He actually was visibly shaken.” He knew Wright to be “a pussycat. . . . He was always a mild, meek guy. He would never speak ill of anybody. So he must have felt pretty threatened to come down and talk to me about it,” he said. But it wasn’t just Rick’s threatening behavior that the professor wanted to talk about.2
The dean listened in shock and astonishment as Wright described how Haefner had appeared unexpectedly at his house at 219 Ronan Drive on the evening of Betsy Aardsma’s murder, not much more than an hour after she died. Rick was out of breath and agitated. He wondered if the Centre Daily Times had come and whether there was anything in the paper about a girl being killed in Pattee Library. Hosler said Wright described “in detail” the weapon Rick typically carried, referring to it as resembling a sharpened screwdriver. At that point, Hosler understood that Wright was telling him that Rick Haefner had probably murdered Betsy Aardsma.
“I was pretty shocked,” Hosler said. “Immediately, a whole lot of things came together when he told me about what happened.” Late in life, Wright would claim that his meeting with the dean took place the morning after Betsy’s murder. But Hosler said that wasn’t accurate, that it took place years later, after Rick’s arrest and trial in Lancaster. “Had he done that [reported his suspicions immediately], we could have really done something,” Hosler said. As it was, the dean knew he had to report what Wright had told him. But to whom?3
Hosler went not to Penn State president John Oswald, who had succeeded Eric Walker in the summer of 1970, but to someone who was arguably even more powerful and influential—the university’s outside general counsel, Delbert J. McQuaide. McQuaide, a name partner in McQuaide Blasko, the largest law firm in State College, filled that role for twenty-seven years, from 1970 until his death from cancer at age sixty in 1997. He devoted much of his life to Penn State, his only significant client, yet was not a Penn State graduate. McQuaide had grown up in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and had graduated from Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where he was president of the board of trustees late in life, and from NYU Law School. McQuaide was an outsider at Penn State, yet at the same time, a consummate insider.4
Steve Garban, who would resign as president of the Penn State board of trustees in 2012 in the wake of the Sandusky scandal, told the Centre Daily Times in 1997 that McQuaide was not just a lawyer but “an integral part of the institution.” Penn State president Graham Spanier, another victim of the Sandusky scandal outcry, said McQuaide had “a great legal mind, and was party to all of Penn State’s most important progress and decisions for years and years.” Hosler, who later in his career was a senior vice president and the provost of Penn State, said there were no important meetings that McQuaide did not attend. Carol Herrman, a senior vice president for administration at Penn State and a neighbor and friend of the university lawyer, was quoted by the State College newspaper as saying that McQuaide told her he could have made more money working as a lawyer in New York than in State College but felt he had made the right choice, “because I work for an institution that was concerned with doing the right thing.”5
So, Hosler went to McQuaide, revealed what Wright had told him about Rick Haefner and the Betsy Aardsma murder, and told him he ought to pass the information along to the state police. But McQuaide did not seem interested. “I didn’t feel he took me terribly seriously,” Hosler said, speculating that McQuaide was thinking, “Yeah, this is another professor who’s got weird ideas.” Sometime later, he happened to see McQuaide and asked him whatever became of the matter. And the university general counsel said, “Oh, the police said they’d already looked into that. And that was the end of it.”6 Hosler now believes he should have gone to Penn State president Oswald, “but I figured the university lawyer would know these people and how to approach them.”
Sergeant George Keibler was still the head of criminal investigation at the state police Rockview barracks in 1976, and still lead investigator of Betsy’s murder, although it was basically just him now. He did not recall the general counsel speaking to him about Rick Haefner. “I can’t recall him ever giving any information on the Aardsma case,” Keibler said.
By 1976, he had little hope left that Betsy Aardsma’s murder would be solved. On November 3, 1976, Keibler was quoted in “Pennsylvanians Here & There,” a feature of the Associated Press, in which newspaper readers wrote in with questions. One reader, who identified himself as having been a Penn State student in 1969, wrote to ask what had ever become of the investigation of the murder of a coed in the school library. Keibler’s bleak reply: “We are no closer to solving the Aardsma case than we were the night the murder occurred.” Even given Keibler’s normal reticence, that does not sound like the response of an investigator who had been handed a hot tip, and it is probably safe to co
nclude that McQuaide did not go to the state police with the information about Rick Haefner.7
Professor Roger Cuffey, Haefner’s defender, speculated that McQuaide looked into what Hosler told him and concluded that while the story told by Professor Wright did point to Rick as Betsy’s killer, there was nothing that could be prosecuted. He speculated that perhaps the Penn State lawyer decided that it was just better to let the Aardsma investigation die.8
Outsiders were beginning to become interested in the unsolved case. Less than a week after Keibler’s comments to the Associated Press on November 3, 1976, Frank W. Merritt of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, wrote to Charles Ness, assistant director of libraries at Penn State. He described himself as a retired English professor who “had often thought that the details of the [Aardsma] case would provide the foundation for a detective story.” Whether Merritt envisioned fiction or nonfiction, he didn’t say. He inquired whether Pattee Library had materials about the case that would be available to him and whether he would need to travel to State College [about 55 miles] to look at them. Finally, Merritt wondered how long it would take to go through the collection.9
Ness replied a week later that “regarding the Aardsma incident of Fall 1969,” he guessed that the most comprehensive files from the case were in the custody of the Pennsylvania State Police. He said nothing about the large number of documents that Penn State itself must have generated during the murder investigation, when forty state troopers were swarming the campus and interviewing thousands of students and faculty. Instead, Ness said that Pattee Library had “a small file of information” that he could probably examine “in two or three hours.” If this was the same file of news clippings and press releases from the Aardsma case available at the Penn State Archives today, it would not take nearly that long. Merritt, perhaps discouraged by the response, never published a book about Betsy Aardsma’s murder.10
Late in February of 1977, a crude, taunting, and anonymous postcard about the failed Aardsma investigation arrived at the office of the Campus Patrol at Penn State bearing an Atlanta, Georgia, postmark. It said, “We killed the cunt in the library; you’ll never solve it.” Members of the Campus Patrol passed the letter around amongst themselves for five or six days, Keibler recalled, then decided maybe they ought to tell Colonel Pelton, the director of security. He was furious, Keibler said, and immediately turned the postcard over to the state police. There were no fingerprints on it beyond those of the Campus Patrol officers who had passed it around. Nor did the handwriting yield any clues. Haefner’s movements at that time are unknown. Was it sent on behalf of one person, or two, as the wording suggests? One thinks of the two young men librarian Dean Brungart saw in the Core shortly before Betsy’s murder. Keibler found it interesting that the postcard was mailed to zip code 16802, for University Park (Penn State’s postal location), rather than to 16801, the State College zip code. That suggested to him that someone with a connection to Penn State, possibly a former student, sent the spiteful message.11
Keibler inquired of Colonel Pelton how many Penn State alumni lived in the area served by the Atlanta mail-processing facility and was told, after consultation with the Alumni Association, that the number was too large for any kind of practical investigation to be carried out. The postcard, like the one sent in 1969, urging police to “look for the guy in the work pants in the library,” remained a mystery. Both seem to have been sent by someone who knew Haefner and the circumstances of Betsy’s murder quite well. Maybe the postcard writer simply enjoyed taunting law enforcement.12
Among Penn State students, the murder of Betsy Aardsma had already become an urban legend. At the beginning of 1979, Nancy Bertram, a student, conducted a remarkable survey of her fellow students at University Park, asking them what they knew about the murder in the Pattee Library stacks. She had no trouble getting responses. One coed said that a friend who worked in Pattee had been told the story by the head librarian when he was about to go work at the spot where Betsy had been killed. In this version, a girl was in the stacks around midnight, “way back in the catacombs of the library, where very few people go or even know about, and someone stabbed her.” And she wasn’t found for a day or so, but they thought she had fainted. There was a “little trickle of blood” coming out of her mouth, which supposedly sometimes happens when people faint. But they figured out she was dead, and when they did the autopsy, they found “a tiny hole left by a penknife in her left breast.” She had been stabbed directly in the heart, but there was no blood on her clothes. “So they think that she was killed by an expert, and he probably had something to do with the Mafia or a drug ring or something. But the fact that the penknife was placed perfectly makes them suspect that experts killed her.”
Bertram heard several versions in which the victim was a policewoman or narcotics agent who was both raped and murdered. In nearly all versions, the body was not found for at least a day, or even several days. In a different version, a female student had fallen asleep in the library and woken up to noise and “this guy in there.” She ran into the stacks, but her killer caught up to her, stabbed her, and dismembered her body. Another student Bertram interviewed had heard a version of the Robert Durgy story, without knowing Durgy’s name or that he had been an English professor. The student told Bertram that it was “really weird,” because her husband knew Betsy and also knew a guy who was also from Michigan who was “having some real emotional problems right around that time. And shortly after that murder, he went back to Michigan and committed suicide.” That would have been Durgy, who police eventually concluded had nothing to do with Betsy’s murder.
Bertram asked many other students if they had heard about the murder in the stacks, and most of them had, although they didn’t know the details. “The story has become part of Penn State’s lore,” she concluded, “and I’m certain it will be kept alive for many years [to come].”13
Part V: Monster
Let them hate, so long as they fear.
—Lucius Accius, Roman poet and playwright (170–86 BC)
Chapter 31
Revenge
After Charles Hosler’s failed attempt to get Penn State interested in Lauren Wright’s story, Rick would never again come close to being exposed as Betsy Aardsma’s killer, even as he engaged in reckless and criminal behavior. He spent the rest of his life in a vain quest to regain his professional respectability, to be Doctor Richard Haefner to the world, but no one would have him. He pursued boys for sex with the same abandon that he pursued unique mineral specimens. And he wrecked people’s lives with frivolous lawsuits. In so many ways, he was a monster.
In his own mind, Rick had been “exonerated”—a word he frequently misused—by the legal skills of Richard A. Sprague, his talented defense counsel from Philadelphia. He believed himself innocent, believed that he had never molested those boys, and couldn’t understand why the rest of the world didn’t believe him. It made him angry, and when Haefner got angry, he tended to behave in crazy, scary ways. You didn’t want to cross him, Chris Haefner recalled. As a former editor of the Lancaster New Era newspaper put it, Rick was “persistent and unrelenting. You could never win an argument with him.”1
For a long time, even as he slid deeper into mental illness, Rick kept a lid on the volcanic rage that the author believes had left Betsy Aardsma dead on the floor of Pattee Library. But even at a simmer, he was dangerous. His weapon of choice became the lawsuit. Sometimes lawyers handled these for him, but it eventually dawned on Haefner that it was really pretty simple to fill out the legal paperwork and represent himself pro se. It wasn’t brain surgery, or at least, so he thought. Because Haefner claimed he was a pauper—without income—he was often excused from the costs paid by most litigants. He could sue the world and incur no legal fees, often not even filing fees. This was meant to be a protection for the legitimately poor, a way to allow people of no means, especially prison inmates, to gain access
to the legal system. Haefner tried and often succeeded in getting pauper status in his lawsuits. It was an easy lie, and too often, judges didn’t roll the log away to see if there was a snake underneath. Nor was there any point to suing him back—he had no known income or assets to attach. The targets of his revenge—the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the police officers who arrested him in 1975, municipalities who employed the officers, or average citizens who crossed him—incurred thousands of dollars in legal fees and untold hours of time and mental anguish in dealing with Haefner’s revenge lawsuits, which they could not simply ignore. While they suffered, Rick boasted of his courtroom prowess.2
Neil Albert, a lawyer who defended the City of Lancaster from some of the lawsuits, commented sardonically that he had “the pleasure of knowing Mr. Haefner for many years.” Albert said the amount of legal paperwork generated by Haefner’s litigation was staggering. “If my memory serves me, one piece of litigation went on for eighteen years before the final defendant was dismissed. And there were others.” Asked to assess Rick’s abilities as a pro se litigant, Albert said he found Haefner to be very bright, with an excellent memory, when it suited him—he had a way of deliberately misremembering details—and very energetic and focused. But he also found Haefner to be difficult for no reason, deeply suspicious and hard to deal with. Part of this seemed due to his personality, Albert said, and part of it was due to his unfamiliarity with the legal process. Asked about the total costs incurred by the taxpayers to defend Rick’s lawsuits, at least the ones involving his client, Albert said it was a difficult question to answer because of the multiplicity of defendants. “I am sure the costs were over six figures,” he said.3