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

by David DeKok

  Chris had always had a good memory. He remembered the good times with Rick, too, but after several days of reflection, he had a clear picture in his mind of his cousin and the damage done. He believed that Rick had killed Betsy Aardsma. What clinched it for him was the official state police description of the running man in the Core. It fit Rick almost exactly. He contacted Skucek and Sherwood and agreed to an interview. The two researchers later played the tape for Trooper Leigh Barrows, the Aardsma cold case officer.16

  Barrows treated Chris with a cold professionalism that came off as disrespect, doubt, and disbelief. She did not go to interview him in Lancaster but instead traded e-mails. She criticized him for putting up his own Myspace page about how Rick was the killer of Betsy Aardsma. She finally turned off Chris completely by asking him where the murder weapon was. He thought it a ridiculous question, and told her so. He didn’t have any idea, and besides, he would say, Rick was too smart to have left it lying around for forty years. He either ground it down to dust or threw it in the Susquehanna River.

  After that, he said, Barrows seemed to lose interest. “So what the hell did [the state police] do for the last forty years except have somebody officially assigned to the case who did nothing?” Chris said. “And then, when they find someone like me, all they’re after is, ‘Do you have the murder weapon?’ ” He was disgusted.17

  Barrows insisted in an e-mail to the author that she had interviewed Chris and did not “turn my nose up at him.” She said he had provided the author with wrong information, but was not specific. Chris was “full of BS,” Barrows said, and was likely angry because she had told him to take down his Myspace page about Rick.18

  Yet despite the friction, Barrows came to accept that Rick Haefner most likely had killed Betsy Aardsma. She mentioned it to several people, including Charles Hosler, the retired dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, to whom Lauren Wright had finally come in 1976 with his story about Haefner’s visit to his home on the night of Betsy’s murder. “She came here and I talked extensively to her, and she was pretty convinced that all the evidence pointed to Haefner,” he said. Barrows arranged for Skucek and Sherwood to give a PowerPoint presentation on the case to a group of present and former troopers, some of whom, like Mike Mutch, had been involved in the original investigation. Mutch said Barrows was enthusiastic about the PowerPoint and believed Haefner was the killer.19

  Even more importantly, Barrows told the Aardsma family in the summer of 2010 that the case appeared to have been solved, and that Rick Haefner was Betsy’s killer. Kathy Aardsma, Betsy’s younger sister, was in Holland for her high school class reunion and told several of her friends. One of them mentioned it to her hairdresser, Angela Wich, the sister of Peggy Wich, Betsy’s old friend from Holland High School. Angela, knowing of her sister’s interest in the case, told Peggy that one of her customers had informed her that the case had been “solved.” Peggy was excited and wanted to know more. She e-mailed the author, who began contacting his other sources. One of them said that the Aardsma family was relieved that the identity of Betsy’s killer might finally be known. Trooper Barrows said that a meeting was being held regarding Haefner that very afternoon.20

  But then the Pennsylvania State Police pulled back. When the author called Barrows again after the meeting, she said she could not comment and referred him to Trooper Jeff Pettucci, a spokesman for Troop G. Pettucci put a damper on speculation about Rick Haefner, saying, “We’re not close to solving the Aardsma case” and that he “didn’t know what was told to the family.” He acknowledged that Rick Haefner’s name came up at the meeting the afternoon of August 19, but only in the sense that he might “possibly have [had] more information about the crime.” He said Haefner “is not a suspect,” but said the state police would never call someone a suspect unless charges had been filed, and they could not indict a dead man.

  But why not say as much publicly? Especially with the Aardsma family being told that Haefner killed their Betsy. “I don’t know what the family was told,” Pettucci repeated. Barrows, in a later e-mail exchange with the author, reacted defensively to questions about why she didn’t close the case if she was certain Rick Haefner had murdered Betsy Aardsma. “I just don’t need to explain myself to anyone,” she said. “I have to follow the policy of the Pennsylvania State Police.”21

  It was an odd turn of events, suggesting that the state police could not see beyond procedure and/or felt humiliated by the fact that civilians had developed Haefner as a suspect, and not themselves. A bewildered Sascha Skucek told Chris Haefner in an e-mail on September 14, 2010, that the state police think they know who did it now, and they were going to make some arrests in the next couple of months. That didn’t happen. It was just another diversionary gambit in a forty-five-year-old murder case with a long history of diversions and false hopes.22

  Epilogue

  Betsy Aardsma’s family never truly recovered after her murder.1 A neighbor, JoAnn Pelon, remembered seeing Dick Aardsma, Betsy’s father, taking long walks. “He just looked very sad and very lonely,” she said. Peggy Wich ran into him years later in a support group for overeaters. He remembered her from the old days as a friend of his daughter’s, and told Peggy that no one in his family would talk to him about Betsy. She was always his favorite, and he cherished the memory of her sunny personality. He died of a stroke in 1997. His obituary asked for memorial contributions to Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Esther Aardsma died in 2012 at the age of ninety-three, living long enough to hear of Trooper Barrows’s belief that the murderer of her daughter had finally been identified, even if her superiors then, strangely, disavowed her. Esther had long since given up hope of the murder being solved, and had many years to think about it. The women in her family tended to be long-lived. Her sister, Anna Ruth Cotts, who had accompanied Esther to State College in 1969 to bring back Betsy’s body, lived to the age of one hundred, dying in 2008. Betsy’s murderer may have stolen at least seven decades of life from her, not to mention a lifetime of accomplishments now lost in the mist of might-have-beens.2

  Carole Aardsma, Betsy’s older sister, and her husband, Dennis Wegner, divorced in 1985. She had been an art teacher for several years after they married but had been a stay-at-home mom after their oldest son, Lorin, was born. After the divorce, she became a Reformed Church minister, serving as associate pastor or director of Christian education at a number of churches before settling into a long career as a prison chaplain. She continued to live with her parents in the family home on East 37th Street. Dennis, who remains deeply affected even today by Betsy’s death, felt a need to fill the void her death created. Betsy had planned a life of service to people, and he did the same, switching from microbiology research to clinical work, with a more direct impact on suffering people. He remarried and has lived for years in Ottumwa, Iowa. Dennis and Carole had one further tragedy to endure: the accidental death of their son Lorin in 2006.3

  “I guess you never really recover,” Dennis said, speaking of the deaths of Betsy and his son. “The pain is less intense, but you never fully recover. That passage from ‘not okay’ to ‘okay’ is a kind of zigzaggy line. You never quite get there, to the point where it is totally gone. For a long time afterward there are little things that happen that put you into the meltdown phase. Just out of the blue.”

  No one from the Aardsma family ever phoned Sergeant George Keibler to find out how the investigation was going or to encourage him to continue. Kent Bernier, who was the investigator of the Aardsma case from 2005 to 2009, and who took the first serious look at the case in many years, said members of the family largely refused to talk to him, which he found hard to understand. “Why would they not be more responsive to the police when their daughter was murdered?” he said. “I know it was forty years ago, but still.”

  Perhaps the reopening of old wounds was simply too painful, but their reticence, combined with the fact that none of Betsy’s
family lived in Pennsylvania, removed pressure on the Pennsylvania State Police to bring the investigation to a successful conclusion, especially after Keibler retired in 1983. For the original investigators of her murder, the desire to bring closure to the family and justice to the murderer never went away, but they weren’t in charge anymore. Even as old men, they would gather periodically over lunch to discuss the case and, once again, go over the theories of who and why. For a long time, they never had a good answer to either question. Some believe they still don’t. Of the originals, George Keibler, Mike Simmers, Ken Schleiden, Ronald Tyger, and Tom Shelar are still alive at this writing. Bill Kimmel, Tom Jones, Bob Milliron, Mike Mutch, and Dan Brode have passed.

  Trooper Tyger did not learn of Dennis and Carole Wegner’s 1972 letter to Chief Justice Warren Burger, opposing the death penalty for Betsy’s killer, for many years. Tyger had gone to work in security for Lockheed Martin Corporation after retiring from the Pennsylvania State Police but had never mentally let go of Betsy Aardsma’s murder. He would periodically search online for news about the case. “You’ve gotta love that girl,” he said of Betsy. “I can shut my eyes and see that girl’s face, just so vivid. That’s the downfall of a criminal investigator. You can’t let it alone; it’s always tugging at you.” In 2001, Tyger came across an article about the Wegners’ letter to the chief justice. Disgusted, and taking it as a personal affront, he gathered up all his personal files on the Aardsma murder and left them at the Rockview barracks.4

  Keibler is in his early eighties and seemingly quite healthy. His tidy home in Zion is bordered by a soybean field, and he has a good view of Mount Nittany, the holy mountain of Penn State University. He and his wife, Beverly, still travel when they aren’t attending their grandson’s Little League games. He keeps a copy of the letter she typed for him as a young trooper, requesting permission from the State Police Commissioner to marry her, a long-ago requirement that is now part of history.

  Sitting back on his basement sofa, Keibler reflected on the Aardsma case and his own role in it. He acknowledged, first, the criticism that his men spent too much time on questionable theories, notably Corporal Brode’s Mall rapist. He agrees with the criticism to a point, but argues that in a murder investigation, all halfway-credible leads must be followed. He levels his own criticism toward those responsible for the damaged crime scene his men inherited from the Penn State Campus Patrol, who were there during the critical first ninety minutes after Betsy was murdered on November 28, 1969.

  “We had a crime scene that for all practical purposes had been taken away from us,” he said. “It had been cleaned up, things had happened. We had no good crime scene.” Yet he is unstinting in his praise of the late Colonel William B. Pelton, who was in charge of the Campus Patrol, calling him a very moral man. The state police in 1969 did not have the advantage of the crime scene investigation techniques and technologies that are well known to anyone who watches CSI or Law & Order on television. There has always been DNA, but in 1969, they didn’t have the slightest idea how to test for it or use it. They had Mary Willard, the Miss Marple of Penn State, but she was too little, too late.5

  Keibler said Penn State did not put up roadblocks during the investigation—unless the probe was steering toward a member of the faculty. “But the wall wasn’t such that you couldn’t go around it,” he said. He was never involved in investigating Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced Penn State assistant football coach and pedophile, but followed the investigation avidly in the Centre Daily Times and told this author that people at all levels of authority in the university and Centre County were aware of Sandusky’s activities long before the scandal was exposed by the author’s former newspaper, the Harrisburg Patriot-News. Keibler said this more in a conspiratorial whisper than an authoritative voice, but one suspects much of what he said was dead on.

  The Sandusky scandal has no known link to the Betsy Aardsma murder, but both affairs displayed the regrettable instinct of Penn State University to place the fortunes of the university above all else—above saving the boy victims of Jerry Sandusky or allowing justice to prevail for the family of a slain coed. Professor Lauren A. Wright, who flunked a serious legal and moral test when he stayed silent for seven years about Rick’s visit to his home the night of the murder and never called the state police at all, died early in 2013. He made several bequests in his will, some large, and left his double-wide trailer in Shoshone to Susan Sorrells, the woman who was briefly and involuntarily an obsession of Rick Haefner’s in 1967–68, when she was still a Smith College coed and her mother owned Shoshone. Sorrells did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. She and others organized a memorial service for Wright in Shoshone on March 23, 2013, that was preceded by a field trip to view some of the geological anomalies the professor studied during his long years in Death Valley.

  Chris Haefner ruminates about his cousin, Rick Haefner, and the sexual abuse he suffered at his hands. He will tell you in one breath how Rick was a genius, a truly great geologist, and in the next, provide yet more evidence of what a monster he was. His cousin scarred so many lives, most of all those of Betsy Aardsma’s family and friends, but also the lives of his boy victims, who had their innocence stolen. Chris seems to regret having come forward, saying that many in his family remain furious at his betrayal. Yet his brave act finally made it possible to bring some closure to the Aardsma family.

  Penn State University and the Pennsylvania State Police owe the public, especially the Aardsma family, an in-depth postmortem of what went wrong in the investigation of Betsy’s death. No family should have to worry that if something happens to their child at Penn State, the public image of the university will be the paramount concern. With the death of so many of the key players, such as former Penn State president Eric A. Walker, this will necessarily require full access to the vast number of documents generated by the investigation. Penn State is almost certainly keeping a large number of Aardsma administrative documents out of public view, if it has not shredded and burned them. No university can expect anything but incredulity when it claims that a single folder of documents—mostly old press releases—and one or two scattered, irrelevant pages elsewhere comprise the sum total of administrative documents it ever generated about what, at that time, was without argument the worst crime in its history, when forty state troopers were on the campus for weeks, questioning thousands of students and faculty. Are we to believe that Penn State president Eric Walker, who wrote memos to the file about the weather and detailed accounts of student demonstrations, had no thoughts about the murder trauma engulfing his campus? Only the files in the Penn State Archives of the university library—not directly mentioning Betsy Aardsma but quite relevant to the story—escaped the apparent purge.

  The files of the McQuaide Blasko law firm ought to be explored as well, so that the question of what, if anything, Penn State counsel Delbert McQuaide did with the information about Rick Haefner he allegedly received from Charles Hosler in 1976 might finally be answered. Sergeant George Keibler says the state police knew nothing about that, and the author believes him, because Keibler made a point and provided examples of how he followed up on every halfway-credible tip he received, even implausible ones. He yearned to solve this murder but needed Penn State’s full cooperation—when it counted—to do so.

  “There is nobody in the administration, in the [campus] police department, working at the library, or in any kind of position here who could respond to any of this speculation or claims about an event four decades ago,” said Penn State spokesman Bill Mahon.6

  Anyone who reasons that all colleges and universities might behave this way under similar circumstances should look at the example of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which in 1950 fully cooperated with local police in their investigation of the murder of Marian Baker, a college employee. They did so even when tips from students and others began to point to one of their own students, Edward L. Gibbs, as he
r killer. Gibbs confessed to the murder, was tried, sentenced to death, and executed in the electric chair. F&M administrators had to have realized early on that that might be the grim outcome of their cooperation, but they did their civic duty.

  So, too, should the state police open their own large Aardsma archive to outside researchers so their handling of the case over forty-five years can be fully assessed. In some states, though admittedly not all, at least some of these records would have long ago become available. Pennsylvania has made them all secret forever, unavailable under the state’s Open Records Act, no matter whether the investigation is open or closed. Even the federal government limits secrecy of national security documents to twenty-five years, with agencies allowed to petition to keep specific documents secret longer if they are still demonstrably sensitive. This seems like a workable solution for granting access to state police documents from old cases. Thanks to lobbying by former Penn State president Graham Spanier, the Pennsylvania Legislature also exempted most Penn State documents from the reach of the Open Records Act, which it came to regret after the Sandusky scandal broke. That broad an exemption from public scrutiny is nearly unheard of for public universities in other states. A full airing of what happened to Betsy Aardsma, and all the reasons the investigation failed, could finally lay this tragedy to rest.

  Had she lived, Betsy Aardsma would be the same age as Hillary Clinton. They were born just a couple of months and about two hundred miles apart. She might have had an equally distinguished career, or she might be a comfortable unknown, just another grandmother enjoying her grandchildren. What Betsy did not deserve was a grave in Pilgrim Home Cemetery at age twenty-two, a victim of the wicked hands of a man who despised women.