by David DeKok
Acknowledgments
The love of family makes it possible for a writer to spend the enormous amount of time it takes to research and write a book. I am indebted to my wife, Lisa W. Brittingham, and my daughters, Elizabeth and Lydia DeKok, for surrendering me to my third-floor office and the passion that drove me to research and write this story.
I could not have written this at all if not for the cooperation of George H. Keibler, the retired sergeant and senior criminal investigator of the Pennsylvania State Police, who tried for fourteen years to discover the identity of Betsy Aardsma’s killer. That he could not was an enormous source of frustration to him. Now in his early eighties, he sat patiently for numerous interviews and answered most of my questions, reserving answers only when he had promised anonymity to a source. His sharp memory helped me to re-create for the first time what really happened in Pattee Library on November 28, 1969, and to dispel many myths about Betsy Aardsma’s murder. My other invaluable source among the original investigators was Mike Simmers, a retired captain who at age twenty-three was the first state trooper to arrive at the murder scene. Mike tapped his extensive network of friends and colleagues to open doors for me that might otherwise have remained closed. He and his wife, Emily, were always hospitable and friendly.
As I noted in the introduction, Betsy Aardsma and I both grew up in Holland, Michigan, and graduated from Holland High School. She was six years older than me and I didn’t know her, but we had several teachers in common. When her friends talked about how much she admired Olin Van Lare, the eccentric but inspiring English literature teacher, I could envision my own hours in his class. I owe a special debt to Betsy’s many friends at Holland High School, Hope College, the University of Michigan, and Penn State, who talked to me at length, sharing their recollections about her and how much they still grieve her senseless death. From Holland High, I was particularly helped by Jan Sasamoto Brandt, who was her closest friend, Phyllis “Peggy Wich” Vandenberg, Margo Hakken Zeedyk, Judi Jahns Aycock, Leslie Nienhuis Herbig, Sandy Vande Water Oosterbaan, and Vicki Sparks Miller, who all knew her as a fellow Dutch Dancer and good friend. Three boys she dated in high school, Luke Kliphuis, Tom Bolhuis, and Jeff Lubbers, also shared their recollections.
Other people from Holland who helped me included Deb Noe Schakel, who provided early and continuing encouragement, especially when I was researching and writing the two-part series in the Harrisburg Patriot-News in 2008 that preceded this book. That series was written just before the involvement of Rick Haefner in her murder became known, which took my book in an entirely different direction. JoAnn Pelon Wassenaar, my own high school classmate and friend who grew up a couple of doors down from the Aardsmas, shared her recollections of the family. There was also one friend from Holland who asked not to be named but knows how I feel. My former next-door neighbor on Graafschap Road, Jim Reidsma, who had a long career in the Michigan State Police, helped me to track down his colleagues who assisted the troopers sent from Pennsylvania in a fruitless search for something in Betsy’s life that would tell them why she was murdered.
Randy Vande Water, the former city editor of the Holland Evening Sentinel, shared his recollections of publishing the news of Betsy’s death, which occupied a significant part of his front page for several days. I valued as well his vast knowledge of Holland people, churches, and history. His various books on Holland history, especially Tulip Time Treasures and Heinz Holland: A Century of History, proved useful as background when I was researching this story. We also swapped newspaper yarns, a bad habit of former journalists.
I cannot say enough about the regional history collection of Herrick District Library in Holland, which helped my research in so many ways. I have used and enjoyed that library ever since, as a boy, I helped to carry boxes of books from the old library in Holland City Hall to the shining new library building donated by the Herricks. My thanks also to Catherine Jung at the Holland Museum Archives for unearthing Betsy Aardsma’s high school transcript from among their holdings. At the Joint Archives of Holland, I found the oral history interviews of Chaplain Bill Hillegonds, Al Vanderbush, and J. Cotter Tharin, which provided many details about Hope College when Betsy was there. Another great source of information for that period was the Hope College Anchor, where I began my training as a journalist as a freshman in 1971.
Among Betsy’s friends at Hope College, I extend special thanks to her freshman-year roommate, Linda DenBesten Jones, who told me many things about her friend, and George Arwady, the former publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger, who dated her once or twice. My brother Dan’s University of Michigan alumni guide helped me to find Terrie Andrews Newman, who along with Andrea Yunker Marchand and Olga Lozowchuk Kraska shared the apartment at 441 South First Street with Betsy. It was Olga who offered up the priceless anecdote about author Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s visit to their apartment in January 1969. Olga had Masses said for Betsy for many years after her death. The staff at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan was always friendly and helpful. Dr. David L. Wright, Betsy’s boyfriend/fiancé, agreed to an interview in 2008 when I was working on the Patriot-News series, but then would not respond to my requests for a second one after I began writing the book in 2010. His friends, Dr. Ian Osborn, Jim Schoolmaster, Dr. Nick and Joann Lekas, and Dr. Steven Margles, offered their own perspectives on his relationship with Betsy Aardsma.
From the three months Betsy spent at Penn State University before her death, I am indebted to her good friend Linda Marsa, a fellow author, for sharing memories. Jeffrey Berger, the president of Students for a Democratic Society at Penn State in the fall of 1969, described the political landscape of the campus in a long and delightful conversation. Pam Farley talked about the birth of the feminist movement in Happy Valley in 1969, and how the Women’s Liberation Front was forced to meet in a restroom in the HUB because the university, at first, would not grant them a proper meeting room. Although Professor Roger Cuffey and I disagreed about the essential nature of Rick Haefner, his former teaching assistant, he answered all of my questions and helped me to understand the process of pursuing graduate degrees in geology. Professor Nicholas Joukovsky, who taught Betsy in the fateful English 501 class and was among the last to see her alive, was endlessly helpful. Joe Head and Dan Stephens, Rick Haefner’s field assistants in Death Valley in 1967 and 1968, respectively, provided valuable information. Penn State University archivist Jackie R. Esposito helped to find material I wanted to see. I believe the purging of the archives of nearly all administrative documents (if they ever arrived there) related to the Aardsma investigation occurred well before her tenure.
Chet Davis, who is an artist and former art teacher at Shamokin Area High School, deserves my particular gratitude. Hearing I was working on this book, he remembered and unearthed from his basement a copy of a nearly forgotten magazine, Focus Fall: Penn State’s Fountain of Truth, published in 1972 and containing an article, “Murder in the Stacks,” written by his roommate, Taft Wireback. I had never heard of this article, and it proved to contain a wealth of important information about the Aardsma case, especially about the events in Pattee Library that preceded the murder.
I cannot say enough about Christopher L. Haefner, the young cousin of Rick Haefner who came forward at no little personal cost to expose his relative for the monster that he was. He was an enthusiastic guide to the better history of the Haefner family in Lancaster and its one-time brewery. Ken Richmond, a Philadelphia lawyer who represented Haefner in his lawsuit against his former lawyer Richard A. Sprague, had an endless store of anecdotes and provided important insights on several matters. Peter Schuyler, whose late wife, Catherine, was savagely beaten by Rick Haefner in a Delaware parking lot in 1998, shared many painful details. He believed that her death from alcoholism in 2012 was the end result of that assault. I also thank Michael Witmer and Dave S. for coming forward and relating how Rick Haefner sexually assaulted boys in Troop 24 in Lancaster w
hen he was an assistant scoutmaster. Dr. Bill Apollo answered my cardiology questions, and Jean Callahan researched the etymology of the word stacks in a library context.
Most of the Aardsma family chose not to be interviewed. I suspect they had bad experiences with one or more of the self-styled citizen investigators of their daughter’s murder before I ever arrived on the scene to write this book. Two who did talk to me were Ron Cotts, Betsy’s cousin, who flew her parents and uncle and aunt in his own plane from Holland to Chicago on the first leg of their sad journey to bring Betsy’s body back from Penn State, and Dennis Wegner, the ex-husband of Carole Aardsma, who described the horror in the Aardsma house when Reverend Gordon Van Oostenburg brought the news of Betsy’s death. I have tried to be fair to the late Reverend Van Oostenburg, whose sermon about God’s will at Betsy’s funeral was disliked by many of her friends.
It is impossible to understand Betsy Aardsma without understanding the Dutch-American and Calvinist culture from which she sprang. I lived in Holland from birth in Holland Hospital in 1953 until I left after graduating from Hope College in 1975 to pursue a newspaper career. Betsy Aardsma and I had much the same sort of childhood. Each of our parents were Hope College graduates. We both marched in Dutch costume with our fellow elementary school students in the annual Tulip Time parades, before throngs of tourists, and thought it entirely normal. I listened to WLS radio from Chicago, heard the news, and had the same aspirations to escape from 1960s Holland and its stifling conservatism, lily-white blandness, and conventionality as she did. The outside world beckoned. Betsy dreamed of James Baldwin and the Peace Corps and Africa, but she never expected to be diverted from that path by others and to encounter Rick Haefner lurking in the Penn State library, among her beloved books. As her onetime boyfriend Luke Kliphuis noted, Holland left her innocent and unprepared for a psychopath like Haefner.
She would have been delighted to know that a changing Holland in 2008 cast a narrow majority of its presidential votes for Barack Obama. I still find it almost inconceivable, however delightful, and I’m sure she would, too.
Notes
The following abbreviations are used in the notes for this book:
CLH: Christopher L. Haefner
CPCLC: Common Pleas Court of Lancaster County
FOIA: Freedom of Information Act, a federal law
GHK: Sergeant George H. Keibler, lead investigator of the Aardsma murder for the Pennsylvania State Police from 1969 to 1983
IJ: Intelligencer Journal, a newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
JSB: Jan Sasamoto Brandt, Betsy Aardsma’s friend
LRC-RTK: Lancaster Recreation Commission Right to Know request filed by the author.
Museum Suit: Rick Haefner’s lawsuit against the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County over their withdrawal of a job offer
PSA: Pennsylvania State Archives, the official archives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg
PSU: Penn State University
ULAD: University Library Administration Documents in the Penn State Archives
USDCEDP: United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
Epigraphs (book and Part I)
1 - “Every unpunished murder”: Daniel Webster, in The Trial of John Francis Knapp as Principal in the Second Degree for the Murder of Captain Joseph White, before the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at a special session commenced at Salem, July 20, 1830 (Boston: Dutton & Wentworth, 1830), 35. Webster was the prosecutor in the case.
2 - “That place was a jungle”: Sergeant George H. Keibler (GHK), Pennsylvania State Police, retired. Interview by the author, January 4, 2011. Keibler was the lead investigator of the murder of Betsy Aardsma between 1969 and 1983.
Chapter 1: The Library in Happy Valley
1 - “something terrible was about to happen”: Howard Taft Wireback, “Murder in the Stacks,” Focus Fall: Penn State’s Fountain of Truth (1972): 13–14; Memo, W. Carl Jackson to Paul M. Althouse, December 3, 1969, ULAD.
2 - Penn State: The university began its history as Pennsylvania Farmers High School in 1855 from empty fields in the middle of nowhere. The name was changed to Agriculture College of Pennsylvania in 1862, when it became one of the early Land Grant colleges under the Morrill Act, and to Pennsylvania State College in 1875. That name survived until 1953, when Penn State president Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of Dwight D., changed the name to The Pennsylvania State University (the definite article always seemed faintly pretentious). Eisenhower also petitioned the post office for a separate postal designation for the university, which duly became University Park on letters parents sent to their children on the sprawling campus. State College borough officials reacted by proposing to change the name of the town to Mount Nittany, after a beloved local landmark, but voters rejected the idea. Eventually the main campus became known as the University Park campus in State College, a confusing bifurcation if ever there was one.
3 - “equally inaccessible from all parts of the state”: This bit of humor is attributed to Edwin E. Sparks, the eighth president of Penn State (1908–20); an underground nuclear explosion: “Blast Proposal Gains Momentum,” Centre Daily Times, State College, PA, April 19, 1967. The kicker on the headline was secrecy shrouds project.
4 - “a village lost in the mountains”: J. Marvin Lee, Centre County: The County in Which We Live (State College, PA: Self-published by J. Marvin Lee, 1965), 226.
5 - “Pattee Library”: Pattee Library was named after Fred L. Pattee, a late-nineteenth-century professor at Penn State who was an early advocate of the study of American literature as a distinct discipline from its English cousin. He also wrote the Penn State Alma Mater, still sung at football games and other occasions.
6 - “Pattee’s stacks . . . were open”: Letter, William Wisely to Eric A. Walker, president of Penn State University, “Proposed Opening of the Stacks at Pattee Library as a Controlled Experiment during the Summer Term 1964,” May 15, 1964, ULAD; Laurie Devine, “Pattee to Retain Open Stack Plan,” Daily Collegian, September 29, 1964.
7 - “gloomy underworld of the stacks”: Douglas Harper, in his authoritative Online Etymology Dictionary (www.etymonline.com), says the first attested use of stacks to describe “the set of shelves on which books are set out” was in 1879, but offers no other details. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971, on page 758, dates the term to 1888 in Jacobi’s Printers’ Vocabulary, where it was defined as “paper or printed works arranged in stacks.” One monumental work in which the term does not appear is Edward Edwards’s two-volume study of the world’s libraries, Memoirs of Libraries (London, 1859), which instead refers to “shelf rooms.” But beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, stacks became the word of choice to describe the rooms where libraries kept their books.
8 - “the building was dark”: Carole L. Stoltz, interview by the author, June 18, 2012.
9 - “another odd word”: The term carrel was even more ancient than stacks, dating to the 1590s and carula, “a small study in a cloister,” although the Online Etymology Dictionary says its definition as “private cubicle in a library” is more recent, dating to 1919 (www.etymonline.com).
10 - “Pattee’s inadequacies”: Lois Nagy, “Library Inadequacy Remains,” Daily Collegian, Penn State University, University Park, July 24, 1969.
11 - “only the fourth-largest library in Pennsylvania”: Rodney Hughes, “Pattee, Fred Lewis,” spring 2006, http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Pattee__Fred_Lewis .html, accessed January 11, 2012. Pattee Library’s collection size and how it compared to other libraries is drawn from the American Library Directory for 1970–71, the edition which best reflects where things stood at the end of 1969. Among academic libraries in the East and Midwest, Pattee was smaller than some and larger than others. Ohio State’s library, for example, h
ad 2.24 million books, while that of the University of Maryland in College Park had 1.09 million. The three larger libraries than Penn State’s in Pennsylvania were: 1) the Free Library of Philadelphia, with 2.53 million books; 2) University of Pennsylvania–Van Pelt Library in Philadelphia, with 2.18 million; and 3) Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, with 2.07 million. The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, dwarfed all other American libraries, with its 14.8 million books.
12 - “in the mid-30s”: Joan A. Kurilla, “Research Library Dedicated,” Centre Daily Times, State College, PA, July 5, 1969.
13 - “Reverend Ralph David Abernathy”: Paul B. Foreman, “What Penn State Students Asked Dr. Ralph Abernathy,” March 11, 1969. Charles Davis Papers, Beinecke Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
14 - “bus driver’s son”: Jeffrey Berger, interview by the author, February 28, 2013; generally orderly behavior: Op. cit., Kurilla, Centre Daily Times, July 5, 1969.
15 - “One of the first memos”: Francis E. Hooley to Charles H. Ness, et al., July 12, 1969, ULAD, PSU Archives.
16 - “They were not a bona fide police department”: Howard “Buzz” Triebold, interview with the author, November 3, 2011.
17 - “He was generally respected”: GHK, interviews by the author on January 4, April 15, and October 10, 2011. Keibler discussed the Campus Patrol and Pelton during each of those interviews, as did Trooper Mike Simmers, PSP retired, interview by the author, October 3, 2008, and Raymond O. Murphy, PSU vice president of student affairs, retired, interview by the author, September 12, 2008; “Pig Pelton”: Jeffrey Berger interview, February 28, 2013.
18 - “a library memo”: Francis E. Hooley, budget assistant, University Library, to James A. Rhodes, Dean of Students staff, January 9, 1969, ULAD.
19 - “spectrum of people”: Charles Hosler, dean of the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, retired. Interview by the author, November 8, 2011, which was a few days after the arrest of former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky and two university administrators in a child sex scandal and alleged cover-up that rocked the university.