by David DeKok
Allen thought he heard something from the stacks but wasn’t sure what. Uafinda heard a thump, like a fist hitting a chest, quickly followed by a gasp.9 But no one heard any angry imprecations, no pleas, no screams of mortal terror, no struggle to the death. A physician familiar with the process of death found the victim’s silence hard to explain, even after a wound that proved so quickly fatal. “It’s just unbelievable that there was no scream,” he said.10 It was as if the murderer and his victim both observed the ancient rule that no noise is to be made in a library. But not for long. Moments later came a crash and the sound of books hitting the floor. A stranger emerged from the Core, coming at Erdely and Uafinda like a speeding train. He looked to be about twenty-five years old, about six feet tall, and big, but not husky. He had one of those professional faces one tends to associate with foreign correspondents on television. He was better dressed than the typical student, wearing a sport jacket over khaki work pants. Allen, who of course had never seen the young man before, thought he was wearing a white shirt and tie.11 Neither Erdely nor Uafinda recognized him either.
When the running man saw the two students, he slowed but did not stop. “Somebody had better help that girl!” he said, gesturing back toward the noise. But he was not going to help her. The stranger continued moving toward the stairs, but then saw Allen, who was still standing well apart from Uafinda and Erdely. The running man whirled and headed back in the opposite direction, but on a route that took him around, not through, the Core.12
Uafinda’s native language was Portuguese, and he knew some French, too, but his facility with English was so-so, acquired after arriving in the United States in 1965. He thought he heard the stranger say, “We’ve got to help the girl!” and followed him. Uafinda followed the running man at a trot back around the Core, back to where Marilee Erdely was deciding what to do, then back into the Core, where he lost him. After one more circuit looking for the stranger, Uafinda left and presumably walked home in the cold darkness to his downtown apartment at 232 West College Avenue. Allen also left, and did not realize for some months that he had been a witness to the aftermath of a murder.13
Meanwhile, Erdely, scared and alone, walked hesitantly into the Core, looking for the source of the noise. Passing the aisle between rows 50 and 51, no more than twenty feet from where she had been standing, she was shocked to see a slender, beautiful young woman in a red sleeveless dress and white turtleneck sweater lying on the floor, half on her side, her reddish-brown hair askew. It was Betsy Aardsma, her classmate from English 501, with whom she had spoken so recently. One leg was propped up on a bookshelf, as if she had been trying to climb to safety before falling to the floor.14 Books lay around and on top of her, and one of the lower shelves hung crazily downward. Her eyes were closed, she was still, and there was a puddle on the floor, later identified as urine. But there was no blood—none that Erdely could see anyway. Erdely told Keibler and his investigators in the coming days that she assumed Betsy had fainted.
Kneeling down, she began smoothing Betsy’s hair, adjusting her red dress, and putting some of the books back on an unbroken shelf. Her actions would infuriate the state police and, however briefly, give her the unwelcome status of someone the police thought might know more than she was telling them.15 Erdely was in shock, rapidly falling to pieces, a breakdown that would mystify investigators. Why did she become hysterical if she thought Betsy had only fainted?16
Erdely would later insist that she cried for help for fifteen minutes or more while a number of Penn State students, like the priest and the Levite in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, passed by and averted their eyes. But it only seemed that long, and her mistaken perception would become part of the mistaken lore of what happened that day. In fact, help arrived almost immediately. When the books crashed to the floor at 4:55 p.m., the sound traveled up through a floor grating and was heard by librarians in the Circulation Department directly above. One of them went down to investigate, saw a young woman lying on the floor being attended to by Erdely, and went back upstairs to inform Elsa Lisle, the chief librarian at the circulation desk, that a girl had fainted in the Level 2 Core. Lisle placed a call to the campus ambulance at Ritenhour Health Center, the student clinic, at 5:01 p.m. The small hospital was a short distance from Pattee Library, not even a minute away by ambulance, or five minutes at a leisurely walk. Even as Erdely, in her mind, was crying for help, two librarians were already at her side, trying to revive the fallen girl.
One of the two librarians who came to Erdely’s assistance was Murray Martin, associate director of Pattee Library, who was in charge that day because Jackson, the director of libraries, was out of town for the holiday. Martin was not surprised when Lisle phoned him; coeds fainted with some regularity in the basement stacks, which were overheated and poorly ventilated. He and another librarian, possibly the original woman who had checked on the noise, had gone down immediately. They turned Betsy on her back, and Martin began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He thought he detected a faint pulse.17
The two ambulance drivers, both students themselves, struggled to maneuver a stretcher down the narrow stairs to Level 2. A librarian led them to where Betsy Aardsma lay. As they drew near, passing as many as nineteen onlookers, they heard Erdely’s hysterical sobbing. Seeing her slumped against the bookshelf, they wondered for a moment if it was her they were supposed to pick up. But they quickly deduced it was the girl in the red dress on the floor who needed their help. One of the drivers observed that Betsy’s face was flushed and wondered aloud if she had suffered an epileptic seizure. The other saw a spot of blood on her blouse—and it was just a spot—and concluded that perhaps she had bitten her tongue during a seizure. The idea of a murder in the Penn State library was far from his mind. Indeed, when he felt her wrist, the driver, too, thought he detected a faint pulse.18 Regardless, they would take her to Ritenhour and let the physician on duty decide what to do. They lifted Betsy onto the stretcher and strapped her down. They also brought her purse, which had fallen to the floor when she did. Squeezing between the bookshelves, they moved her toward the stairs. It was 5:08 p.m.
Erdely pulled herself together and caught up with them at the base of the stairs, which they had begun to climb before realizing the impossibility of maneuvering a loaded stretcher around tight turns. They asked a librarian hovering nearby if there was any other way out, and were led to the freight elevator at the eastern end of the stacks. Before the doors closed, Erdely rushed in behind them. They emerged from the warmth of Pattee Library into the cold darkness outside. At that time of year, the last hints of daylight were gone by 5:15 p.m. They loaded the stretcher into the ambulance and Erdely climbed inside. She seemed very fragile, and there was no time to argue.
The ambulance turned into the Ritenhour courtyard around 5:15 p.m. and pulled up to the door. The student attendants wheeled Betsy into the waiting area, where they were met by Dr. Elmer Reed, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who had joined the clinic staff the previous summer. He had just come on duty for an all-night shift and was the only physician on duty. Two registered nurses working the 4:00 p.m.-to-midnight shift were also there. Given what Elsa Lisle had reported when she called, Reed was expecting a student who had fainted and could be quickly revived, but this looked far more serious.19 The attendants told him she had been found unconscious on the floor of the library, lying in a puddle of urine. Maybe there was a pulse, but they weren’t sure. Reed, suddenly filled with dread, motioned to them to follow him to the emergency room through a door to the left. Erdely, holding Betsy’s purse, moved to follow, but was told by Dr. Reed to wait on one of the wooden benches. The doors closed and Erdely was left by herself.
Ritenhour had sixty-five beds and sixty-six full-time employees, including fifteen physicians and about twenty-two nurses, and a twenty-four-hour emergency room. But it was in no sense a major hospital or trauma center, even in the way that term was understood in 1969. If one of Penn State�
�s twenty-six thousand students that year had pneumonia or the flu, an ankle sprain, needed birth control pills, or had problems with asthma or any number of other common ailments among students, including alcohol poisoning, Ritenhour was fine. They could get medicine and hospitalization for as long as necessary, which typically was no more than two to three days. The problems came in the rare instances—rare in a large population of mostly healthy young people—of serious illness or injury. There were simply no good options at Ritenhour, or nearby, for advanced care.
Penn State had been trying to improve student and regional health care since 1966, when it donated thirty acres of land near Beaver Stadium for construction of a new Centre County Hospital to replace the old and poorly regarded hospital in Bellefonte, the county seat. That hospital was eleven miles from campus over two-lane roads. The State College area suffered from a severe physician shortage in 1969, and dependents of married graduate students, not eligible for treatment at Ritenhour, often had trouble getting even the most basic care. The new hospital project was fraught with politics, and not much had happened yet in terms of bricks and mortar. The closest real hospital, with a fairly good (for 1969) ER, was in Altoona, forty-one miles away over a mountain highway. In the other direction was Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, seventy miles from campus. The new Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, location of Penn State’s fledgling medical school, was nearly a hundred miles from the main campus in Hershey, the famous chocolate town. There were no helicopter ambulance services then in Pennsylvania, or in most parts of the country, for that matter. Those would be one of the few positive legacies of the Vietnam War.20
For Betsy Aardsma, it no longer mattered. Dr. Reed checked her vital signs and pronounced her dead, although of what he remained uncertain. He did not have the attendants move her from the gurney onto the examining table. At 5:20 p.m. Reed drew a sheet over her corpse and went to find out who she was. Walking out, he was surprised to see Erdely going through Betsy’s purse. He barked at her, demanding to know what she was doing. Still in shock, she stared at him as if in a trance, and said, “I don’t know.” She handed over the purse. Inside, Reed found a Michigan driver’s license identifying the victim as Betsy Ruth Aardsma, age twenty-two, of East 37th Street, Holland, Michigan. There was also a Penn State student identification card. He didn’t doubt that she was a student, but it was good to have confirmation.21
Reed placed a telephone call to Dr. John A. Hargleroad II, director of the University Health Services, and told him what had happened. Hargleroad, in turn, called Raymond O. Murphy, dean of student affairs, and Charles L. Lewis, vice president of student services, to let them know a student had died under mysterious circumstances. It was up to Murphy to notify Betsy’s parents, who lived nearly 550 miles from State College. After pulling Betsy’s student information card, he contacted the Aardsma family pastor, Reverend Gordon Van Oostenburg of Trinity Reformed Church in Holland. He agreed to go to the Aardsma home, about a five-minute drive from his parsonage, and inform her parents. At the time, he knew only that Betsy had collapsed in the library shortly before 5:00 p.m. and had been pronounced dead a half-hour later. He was not told how she had died, because at that point, Murphy didn’t know.22
The pastor drove his car through the snowy, darkened streets of Holland, dreading the task he faced. He had several children of his own. Tall, balding, and gregarious, with a big smile, Van Oostenburg had led Trinity Reformed Church for seven years and was known for his compassion. He turned off Lincoln Avenue at the Salad Bowl restaurant and proceeded onto East 37th Street. The street was lined with silver maples that loomed ominously in the winter night. The Aardsmas lived toward the end of the street on the right, a few houses before it dead-ended at a playground and ball field. They lived in a modest, very typical, two-story middle-class house on a street of similar houses. Their house had two bedrooms down and one up, a broad front yard, and a vacant lot on the south side. The garage was attached to the house by a breezeway.23
Holland was a small city of twenty-five thousand on the western side of the state, near Lake Michigan. The inhabitants, including the Aardsma family and Reverend Van Oostenburg, were mainly of Dutch descent, and routinely religious. Although there were wide variations in devoutness within the community, the surprise would have been if the Aardsmas had not been church members. He turned into the Aardsma driveway, crunching the gravel before reaching the pavement and parking his car. Outside it was in the mid-20s, warmer by nearly 10 degrees than the previous night, but he still missed the car’s warmth as he walked toward the front door. It was just before 8:00 p.m., and Betsy had been dead for three hours.24
Inside, where it was warm and bright, the Aardsma family had finished a dinner of Thanksgiving leftovers. Carole Wegner, Betsy’s older sister, and her husband, Dennis, were visiting from Madison, Wisconsin, and were preparing to go out to a movie. Their young son, Lorin, would stay home with his grandparents. Kathy Aardsma, at age thirteen the youngest child of Dick and Esther, had gone to visit a friend. Dennis Wegner heard the door open, looked up, and was surprised to see Reverend Van Oostenburg enter the house with a somber expression. In a flash, the Aardsma world collapsed into that special agony and confusion known only by parents who are told, without any warning, that they must prepare to bury a child.25
Reverend Van Oostenberg gave them Raymond Murphy’s phone number. Dick Aardsma called immediately, recalling later that the Penn State official was “very cold and short,” telling him he would need to wait for the state police to tell him how Betsy had died. Murphy remembered the call as a simple, businesslike conversation to verify the bad news and let the family know their daughter’s body would be taken to the Koch Funeral Home, the only funeral home in State College. Van Oostenburg stayed to pray with the parents, and Dennis and Carole drove to pick up Kathy. “We all went to bed an hour later, but none of us slept very well,” Dennis later recalled. “We all kept waking up and thinking it was not real, and it all was just a bad dream.” As they drifted off into fitful sleep, they had no idea that Betsy was not just dead, but had been murdered.26
Chapter 3
The Long Night
Around 6:00 p.m., after having notified university officials, Dr. Elmer Reed placed a call to the Pennsylvania State Police barracks at Rockview. He told the desk man that a female student had been found dead of unknown causes in Pattee Library. Startled, the officer took notes and passed the information to the shift supervisor, who went to look for Trooper Mike Simmers, the youngest criminal investigator at the Rockview barracks, and the only one on duty that night. Simmers was twenty-three years old, just a year older than Betsy. He worked undercover on campus, monitoring the political activities of left-wing students, as well as the illegal drug trade, and he knew the campus well. In fact, he was a student himself. 1
The Pennsylvania State Police had been created by the Legislature in 1905, at a time when the state was little more than a resource colony of Wall Street, providing vast amounts of lumber, oil, coal, and iron to the American industrial machine. The state police replaced the so-called Coal and Iron Police, a motley collection of corporate security forces authorized by the Legislature in 1900 to protect business property, mainly mines, from strikes and other union activities. After the United Mine Workers of America was victorious in the big anthracite coal strike of 1902, a cry went up to replace the hated Coal and Iron Police with an official state police force, the first in the nation, that would serve and protect all citizens, not just Wall Street. Unions, doubting the state police would really be evenhanded, fought the proposal and managed for a time to limit the number of state troopers to just 228 for the entire state. Over the years, the numbers grew, although in 1969 they still had fewer than three thousand troopers, all white men. They worked out of barracks in the rural areas of Pennsylvania, wearing crisp gray uniforms, black boots, and distinctive Smokey Bear hats with chin straps. They enforced traffic laws on the highways and the cri
minal code in small municipalities without a police force of their own.2
The state police had a command structure similar to the army, with nearly as many rules and regulations. Recruits often came directly from the military, almost never from college, and indeed, for many years, prior military service was a requirement. Troopers were already accustomed to the regimental life when they put on the uniform. They received three months of training at the state police academy at Hershey. Those who passed their final exams were put straight to work. Whether a trooper did traffic enforcement or investigated a murder depended mainly on chance and circumstance. “We did everything,” said Corporal Eugene Kowalewski, stationed at Rockview in 1969, and long retired. “If you came on it, you handled it.” If more work on a case was needed, the commander might send out one of the specialized criminal investigators, such as Corporal Dan Brode or Simmers, from the “Crime Room” at Rockview.3
The Rockview barracks was located off Benner Pike near the gates of the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, a minimum-security prison with a “big house” look. The barracks had once been the home of the prison warden. Despite their proximity to the prison, the troopers had nearly nothing to do with security inside, although if there had been a bad riot, they would have helped to restore order. The penitentiary had about six hundred inmates and also housed the state’s electric chair, an odd side dish on its minimum-security menu. Death Row was elsewhere; condemned prisoners were transported to Rockview shortly before their execution. Witnesses signed a large ledger book before the electrocution, and a second time, often in a much shakier hand, after they saw the condemned man die. The last inmate to die in the chair had been Elmo Smith, a sex killer from the Philadelphia suburbs, in 1962.4
