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

by David DeKok

  Simmers was in the kitchen, talking to some of the other troopers, when the shift supervisor appeared. He told him a coed had been found dead in Pattee Library. Simmers took courses at Penn State under the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) and knew the library well. He never thought of it as a dangerous place. Grabbing the keys to an unmarked cruiser, he sped off toward the university. There was little traffic on Benner Pike, and in barely ten minutes he was in State College. He parked outside Pattee Library, where a member of the Campus Patrol was waiting for him. It was around 6:30 p.m.5

  Simmers was young, and looked young, which is why he had been recruited for undercover work in the spring of 1968, right around the time the campus had been rocked by civil rights and antiwar protests. His superiors wanted him to be the eyes and ears of the state police, quietly monitoring and investigating the protests and protesters and keeping track of the drug dealers. Simmers had the freedom to choose how he looked and dressed on the job and chose a “Joe College” look rather than going hippie, as some of his successors did. He didn’t consider himself truly undercover, and, indeed, his identity eventually became known. This didn’t sit well with some of his professors, causing him to be barred from a psychology class by one and denounced at a press conference in Old Main by another. Nor did some of his fellow students care much for his role.6

  Later that year, on November 5, 1968, Simmers tangled with SDS protesters when General William C. Westmoreland, the army chief of staff and a hated symbol of the Vietnam War, came to State College for the Army–Penn State football game.7 Westmoreland had commanded US troops in South Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. After the disastrous Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, he had been relieved of command by President Lyndon B. Johnson. No official announcement of his visit was made until the game began, but word leaked out, and the SDS posted flyers urging students to welcome a mass murderer. A car carrying the general and President Walker of Penn State was blocked by about seventy-five protesters from leaving the driveway of the president’s official mansion on campus, not far from the lower end of the Mall.8 Some of them rocked the car. Simmers, in plain clothes, waded into the crowd and began throwing punches to distract the protesters from Westmoreland. He got his ass kicked, but the general got to Beaver Stadium for the game.9

  Once in Pattee Library, Simmers descended to the Level 2 stacks and was shown where Betsy’s body had been discovered. Two other members of the Campus Patrol and several students were there. Colonel Pelton, who headed the Department of Security, was nowhere in sight, and no one appeared to be making sure the scene was not disturbed. The Campus Patrol told Simmers what he already knew: that the unconscious girl had been taken to Ritenhour and pronounced dead. Simmers took their names and asked if they would mind staying and securing the scene—meaning keep people out—until he could figure out what had happened. There wasn’t much else he could do, given that he was the only state trooper in the library.10

  So he walked over to Ritenhour, met Dr. Reed, and was stunned to hear that he now believed that Betsy had been murdered. He told the young trooper that after he had made the telephone calls, he returned to Betsy’s body, pulled back her clothing, and found what appeared to be a small knife wound in her left breast. Simmers asked to see the body. Reed took him to the gurney, by that time moved to a hallway, pulled back the sheet, and once again removed her red sleeveless dress and white turtleneck sweater, which had a small bloodstain on the inside. Reed removed her bra and pointed out the inch-wide slit where the knife had entered her breast. There was no doubt that the beautiful and young Betsy Aardsma had been murdered. “Mike, this is a homicide,” he said. But where was all the blood?

  The young trooper knew he was out of his depth. Simmers had never originated a murder investigation on his own. He phoned back to the barracks and asked the desk man to send Corporal Dan Brode, a more senior investigator, as soon as possible. Brode had been designated by Sergeant George H. Keibler, the chief of criminal investigation, as the on-call “reserve man” for Black Friday night, in case a major crime occurred. Keibler had left Wednesday for his father’s hunting camp north of Smethport, in the mountains of McKean County, intending to do some turkey hunting on the last day of that season and go bear hunting when that season opened Monday. The desk man reached Brode and told him to go to Ritenhour. After conferring with the shift supervisor and Lieutenant William Kimmel, the commander of the Rockview barracks, he began calling in other troopers as well.11

  Another officer, Corporal Eugene Kowalewski, was reached up in Snow Shoe, in the northern part of Centre County, and Corporal Mike Mutch at a party in Pleasant Gap. Mutch, in turn, called an old friend at home, Centre County District Attorney Charles C. Brown Jr., only to learn he was at a high school basketball game. The desk man also summoned Trooper Jan Hoffmaster, who was about to leave for his own hunting camp, and told him to meet up with Brode and Simmers at Ritenhour. When he arrived, Brode ordered him to stay with Betsy’s body while he and Simmers went back to Pattee Library. Corporal Kowalewski soon joined them.12

  Brode, who was considered a loner by his colleagues, was certain he knew who had killed Betsy—the so-called Nittany Mall Rapist.13 The Nittany Mall, which opened in the late fall of 1967, was located along Benner Pike, midway between the Rockview barracks and the university. There had been two rapes, both of teenage girls—one in the fall of 1968, and another a year later. Each girl had been abducted at knifepoint in the Mall parking lot, driven in her own car a few miles up onto Mount Nittany, above Pleasant Gap, then raped and abandoned. The second girl had the presence of mind to observe that her rapist had had dirt under his fingernails and that his hands were rough, leading police to conclude that he was a country laborer of some sort.

  Both of the rape cases were assigned to Brode, who had no suspect. He had the man’s fingerprints from the rearview mirror of the girl’s car in the second crime but was unable to match them to anyone. In the late 1960s, matching fingerprints to a suspect who wasn’t already in custody involved far more luck than science. Even if the police had latent prints gathered at a crime scene and a suspect, they could not force him to give new prints without first arresting him. And if they arrested him, they had better have a case. Fingerprints were not the magical identifier of popular belief. Movies and popular fiction distorted the reality. All Brode could do with the prints on the mirror was check them against on-file prints of men released from Pennsylvania prisons or send them to the other state police barracks across Pennsylvania, in hopes that they could find a match in their own files. Not until Japanese scientists developed the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) in the late 1980s was there widespread computerization of American fingerprint files.14

  As he walked to the library, Brode contemplated what today seems a rather implausible scenario: that a farm laborer from the country had come onto the Penn State campus looking for a victim, went to a library he had probably never visited or even seen in his life, and made his way from the main entrance down into the maze of stacks. There, he happened to encounter Betsy Aardsma, tried to abduct her, stabbed her in the heart when she resisted, and then escaped, all the while making no noise or being seen by anyone. It made little sense, but Brode was undeterred.

  Brode was shocked when he arrived in Pattee Library and found the crime scene in disarray. No one was really in charge. Forty-five minutes had elapsed between Marilee Erdely’s discovery of Betsy on the floor and the arrival of the Campus Patrol, when Colonel Pelton, who made all major decisions for the security force, had issued vague orders to “close it off.” He hadn’t told them it was a crime scene. In the interim, and for some time after the Campus Patrol had arrived, high-ranking university administrators—or, as Sergeant George Keibler put it, “people of influence at the university”—had been allowed to tramp through the area where Betsy had been found. Keibler said President Walker was among the visitors that night. Even in those more-casual days
of crime scene investigation, this was a bizarre situation.15

  Corporal Kowalewski remembers encountering curious Penn State students around the periphery of the crime scene. “They were just milling around in there,” he said. “We asked several kids if they were in that section of Pattee Library at the time [of the murder]. They said no.” He and Brode and Simmers walked among the rows of books, looking for anything that might be tied to the murder. They found nothing, other than confirmation that they were not examining a virgin crime scene.16

  That was far from the only blunder of the evening. One of the librarians, probably Murray Martin, had ordered a janitor to clean up the crime scene, including the puddle of urine on the floor. It no doubt made perfect sense at the time. The young coed had just been carried off to Ritenhour, unconscious but presumably alive. Why not clean up the mess? However well-intentioned, the effect on the subsequent investigation was disastrous. Books that had tumbled to the floor around her body were moved, some by Erdely, some by the librarians, some by the janitor. A few remained on the floor when Brode and Simmers and Kowalewski arrived. The nearby shelves had been touched, and some had been wiped down. People had walked over the spot where she had fallen. The immediate crime scene and any evidence that might identify the killer had been thoroughly contaminated.17

  There had also been no move to bar the doors of Pattee Library to prevent potential witnesses from leaving. The doors had stayed open, and the counter showed that 157 people had left via Exit 1, the main door, and 52 via Exit 2, in the hour after the murder. Almost certainly, potentially valuable witnesses, not to mention the killer, had left during that time. Access to the Level 2 stacks was blocked early in the evening, but the rest of the library remained open for business. Students continued to come and go until the library closed at midnight.18

  Brode ordered Simmers to accompany Betsy’s body to Centre County Hospital, where an autopsy would be performed. District Attorney Brown, who had been summoned from the stands at the basketball game, and Lieutenant Kimmel also went to the hospital. But who would do the post-mortem? The choices were Dr. Thomas G. Magnani, the only pathologist in Centre County, or an older, better-known pathologist who practiced in Altoona and would have to drive more than forty miles to the hospital.19

  Fireworks erupted. Brown didn’t know Dr. Magnani, who had moved to Centre County fairly recently. He worried about the autopsy results standing up in court in what he assumed would be the inevitable trial of Betsy’s killer. In fact, Magnani, who was thirty-six years old and a graduate of Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, had performed many forensic autopsies in Maryland and some in Centre County. By his own account, Magnani went to the basement morgue at the hospital to view Betsy’s body, but Lieutenant Kimmel, who agreed with Brown’s concerns, told him he was too young and inexperienced to do the postmortem. Magnani stormed out, “mad as a hornet,” and drove home, walking in the door to a call from Corporal Mutch, who managed to soothe his anger and persuade him to come back. Mutch remembers saying to Brown and Kimmel, “He’s a good man. Let him have it,” meaning, do the autopsy. In an alternate version of this story, Kimmel asked Centre County coroner W. Robert Neff about Magnani’s qualifications, but loudly and publicly enough that it soon got back to the pathologist, who reacted predictably. In any case, Magnani returned to perform the postmortem. He received no apology from Kimmel, who, the pathologist claimed, had “too big of an ego.”20

  Word of the murder had leaked out to the local press. The state police put out a brief news release late Friday evening, identifying the body found in the library as Betsy Ruth Aardsma, twenty-two, of Holland, Michigan, but listing the cause of death as unknown. Nor would the desk man tell reporters whether foul play was suspected. But a reporter for the Pennsylvania Mirror—the State College edition of the Altoona Mirror—reached Neff at 11:15 p.m. Neff, free to say what he wanted, told the reporter that the photographing of Aardsma’s body had just been completed and that an autopsy would begin in about half an hour.21

  From the official autopsy report by Dr. Thomas J. Magnani:

  Aardsma, Betsy Ruth, 22, Female

  Date of Autopsy: 11/28/69

  Started: 11 p.m.

  Finished: 4 a.m.

  Clinical Diagnosis: Stab Wound of Chest

  Final Autopsy Diagnosis:

  Penetrating wound of left chest involving skin and subcutaneous tissues, sternum, thymus, pleura, pericardium, pulmonary artery heart, left hemothorax 3,000 milliliters, cutaneous contusion, left anterior chest, hemopericardium, abrasion of right ear, abrasion of right mastoid area, tracheobronchial aspiration of gastric content, compression atelectasis of left lung, pulmonary congestion and edema, accessory spleen. The knife went through her left breast. Left pleural space almost completely filled by 3,000 milliliters of fresh liquid and clotted blood. Wound three inches deep.

  The body is that of a well-nourished 22-year-old female that measures 68 inches from crown to heel and weighs approximately 125 pounds. She is fully clothed. The outer garment consists of a red dress without sleeves. This dress has wide lapels and each lapel has fresh bloodstains on it. The right lapel [from Magnani’s perspective] . . . contains a transverse linear cut measuring 3/16 of an inch in length. This is surrounded by bloodstains. Beneath this garment there is a white turtleneck cotton sweater. This contains fresh blood stains across its anterior portion just beneath the turtleneck collar. Within these bloodstains there is a linear cut measuring one inch. . . . Beneath the sweater there is a white full slip that contains bloodstains. . . . Beneath the slip is a brassiere which is bloodstained. These stains are larger on the right side of this garment. There is no evidence of a cut within the brassiere. The remainder of the body is clothed with blue underpants and panty hose. All of these articles are intact. Both the underpants and panty hose are soaked with urine. She is also wearing a pair of light tan shoes which show no significant abnormalities. The hair is reddish brown, the eyes are hazel. . . . There are contact lenses in place over both corneas.

  The configuration of the skin wound and wound tract suggest that the weapon is a pointed, bladed instrument. The blade of this measures 7/8 of an inch in width and has a minimum length of 3 1/2 inches. . . .The findings also suggest that the wound was inflicted with considerable force at the time of a face-to-face confrontation of the victim and the assailant, and that this weapon was held in the right hand of this assailant. The abnormalities created by the wounds in the heart point to a very rapid, almost immediate collapse following their infliction, and death very likely then followed in less than five minutes.22

  Translated, the autopsy report said that Betsy Aardsma was stabbed in the chest during a face-to-face confrontation with her killer. The weapon was wielded with considerable force and penetrated her breastbone—no easy feat. The blade sliced through one of her lungs, causing it to collapse, and pierced the pulmonary artery of her heart. Her chest cavity filled with just over three liters of blood, about half the volume in her body. The wounds on her head were most likely caused when she fell to the floor, hitting her head on the bookshelves and the floor itself. She was not raped.23 And she died very quickly, probably without excessive suffering.

  The manner of her death would provoke much debate over the next forty years among the original investigating officers. Some of them, agreeing with Dr. Magnani, swore she only could have been stabbed straight on from the front. Others, just as certain, insisted the killer had grabbed her from behind, reached around, and pulled the knife into her chest.24 What seemed clear is that Betsy had been taken by surprise by someone who could get close enough to her in the narrow aisle between the rows of books without triggering a retreat or a cry for help. Most likely that was someone she knew, someone filled with silent rage and strong enough to plunge the knife through her breastbone. The autopsy found no defensive wounds on her hands or arms, received trying to ward off a knife. Nor was there any skin of the killer under her fingern
ails.25 And there was nothing tentative about the knife wound. The killer had no doubts about what he had wanted to do and drove the blade in with a vengeance, right through her breastbone and into her heart.26

  Death by exsanguination, the medical term for how Betsy Aardsma died, doesn’t take long when a major artery is severed—a few minutes at most, wrote Dr. Sherman B. Nuland in his book, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter.27 The loss of three liters of blood in a 125-pound woman was more than enough to stop her heart. Betsy quickly would have gone into a coma and died. Dr. Magnani believes she could have been saved only if she had been immediately hooked up to a new blood supply in a modern trauma center and attended by a skilled thoracic surgeon, none of which (except, in theory, the blood) existed in Centre County in 1969.28

  And why did so little of Betsy Aardsma’s blood escape her body, which deceived the librarians and ambulance attendants into thinking she was still alive, critically delaying the search for her killer? Dr. Magnani said it was because the knife wound was “just a slit” and offered only a tiny, narrow path for the blood to exit her body. Instead, it filled up the pleural cavity, or, in layman’s terms, her chest.29 The severe internal bleeding also caused her face to become flushed, which they mistook for a sign that she had merely passed out from a seizure and was still alive. Dr. John Hargleroad II, director of University Health Services in 1969, said they well could have imagined they felt her pulse, because they expected they should feel one. “Maybe you stretch things a little bit to convince yourself that you do,” he told reporter Taft Wireback in 1972.30

  The final issue from the autopsy would, like the manner of the stabbing, be debated among investigators for the next forty years. Magnani made note of a circular black-and-blue mark found on Betsy’s left breast just below the knife wound. Simmers thought it might have been caused by the killer’s knuckle, or by the part of the knife where the blade met the handle. Mutch thought it might have been made by a wristwatch worn with the face on the killer’s inner wrist, as some men do.