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

by David DeKok

  Or perhaps it was none of the above. Andrea Yunker, who shared a room with Betsy Aardsma during their junior and senior years at the University of Michigan, said in an interview in 2011 that it wasn’t a bruise at all, but rather a birthmark. “It was always there,” she said, describing the mark as resembling a large strawberry. “I saw Olga [Lozowchuk, who lived in the same apartment as Aardsma and Yunker] at the funeral, and she said, ‘I wonder if they stabbed her in the birthmark?’ ”

  At the conclusion of the autopsy, Dr. Magnani closed her up and sent her to the morgue, from where she would be taken to the Koch Funeral Home in State College. His part of the investigation was over. That of the Pennsylvania State Police had barely begun.

  Chapter 4

  Trying for a Do-Over

  Even while the autopsy was in progress, Lieutenant William Kimmel tried for a do-over, a restarting of an investigation that had sputtered and failed before it had gotten very far down the road. He was the commanding officer of the Rockview barracks and was the boss of both Simmers and Brode. Bad luck and serious mistakes by the Campus Patrol and the library had allowed the crime scene to be contaminated and any number of potential witnesses to walk out the door. The murderer had fled into the gathering darkness, running from Pattee Library. What Kimmel did not yet understand was how different, and difficult, it would be to search for a murderer on a college campus. Penn State University was a world unto itself, with its own rules and culture, and he was barely even a tourist. His chief of criminal investigation at Rockview, Sergeant George H. Keibler, had been at the barracks since 1965 and had been commanding officer until the beginning of 1969, when Kimmel arrived from the country to take over. Keibler had had three years to study Penn State and knew it was a different animal. But he was away on vacation, and so Kimmel took personal charge of the Aardsma investigation.

  The last murder of a Penn State student had taken place in 1940. Seventeen-year-old Rachel Taylor, a home economics major, was abducted and murdered after she arrived back in State College on a bus from Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, her hometown. She lived in Atherton Hall, the same dorm where Betsy lived, but never made it back to her room from the bus stop. She was seen getting into somebody’s car at 1:30 a.m., ten minutes after the bus had arrived. Her nearly naked body was found five hours later in Lemont, three miles outside of town. Taylor’s murder was never solved. Too many people came and went at a big university, making it difficult for the police to track suspects. And now Kimmel faced the same dilemma.

  When a woman is murdered, police look for a man. The lieutenant told his men to find out if Betsy had a boyfriend. Among the first people questioned was Sharon Brandt, Betsy’s roommate, who was a zoology student from Oyster Bay, Long Island. She was in their dorm room when the police located her, and she identified Betsy’s boyfriend as David L. Wright, a first-year medical student at the new Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey.

  Kimmel arranged for two detectives from the state police barracks in Harrisburg, the state capital, to drive to Hershey and wake up Wright for questioning. Detective Cornelius Shovlin and his partner—no one today can remember his name—drove down Route 322 into Hershey, fifteen miles east of Harrisburg and even smaller than State College, veering off before they passed the Reese and Hershey plants that made the town famous among candy lovers. Their destination was the Milton Hershey School, a private academy for disadvantaged youth started in 1909 by chocolate magnate Milton Hershey and his wife. Surplus housing at the school was being used as temporary quarters for the medical students, and Wright and several classmates shared one of the redbrick cottages. He was about to find out that the boyfriend, if there is one, is always the number-one suspect when a young woman is slain and the killer gets away.1

  The two detectives pounded on Wright’s door around 2:00 a.m. They told him to get dressed and come downstairs, where they sat him down at the kitchen table. According to Wright’s memory of the incident forty years later, they spent twenty minutes questioning him about his whereabouts that afternoon before telling him why they were there.2 He told them several times in several ways that he had been in the gross anatomy laboratory, dissecting a cadaver, around 5:00 p.m. Other medical students in the house could vouch for him. Finally they told him the awful news—that Betsy Aardsma, his girlfriend, had been murdered in Pattee Library. In his mental agony, Wright “wanted to scream,” he told Kevin Cirilli, a writer for the Penn State Daily Collegian, and later, for Politico, but seemed unable to move his vocal cords. To Wright, it seemed increasingly obvious from the questions that he was their chief suspect.3

  But the interrogation was not over. Detective Shovlin and his partner roused the other occupants of the house, including Wright’s roommate, John Misiti, and Steven W. Margles. The detectives separated the young men and questioned each individually about David’s alibi. Each confirmed that their friend had been with them, dissecting cadavers, around the time Betsy was murdered. Later on, they had gotten together to study microbiology. There was no way David could have been at Penn State’s main campus. Indeed, it would have taken him two hours to drive to State College and two hours to drive back. But perhaps he had hired someone to kill her? His friends knew of no serious quarrels between David and Betsy. In fact, the couple had just spent Thanksgiving Day in the cottage and, with the other students who stayed on campus, enjoyed a homemade turkey dinner cooked by some of the women students. From everything his friends could see, David and Betsy had a good relationship.4

  Margles came to believe that the state police were slow to drop David as a suspect because of the seeming medical precision of Betsy’s fatal wound, a wound that had bled almost entirely inside her body. But he was skeptical of their reasoning. “I mean, I couldn’t hit that if I tried, knowing the anatomy pretty well,” Margles said. “And if you’re going to kill somebody, are you going to do it in the middle of Pattee Library?”5

  After the detectives left, Wright, shaken, went to the hall telephone and called his father, Dr. Donovan Wright, a psychiatrist in Elmhurst, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. He poured out what had happened, telling him that his girlfriend had been stabbed to death. After his son hung up, Dr. Wright placed a call around three in the morning to the Aardsma family to offer his condolences. Dick Aardsma answered the phone and heard for the first time that his daughter had been stabbed to death. In his grief and confusion, he thought it was the state police calling.6

  Not wanting to repeat the mistakes that had allowed the crime scene to be contaminated, Kimmel ordered Trooper Ken Schleiden to look for evidence in Betsy’s room in Atherton Hall and remain there until he was relieved in the morning. Schleiden was almost as young as Simmers but had been on the force slightly longer. Atherton Hall had become Penn State’s first coed dormitory that fall and was only for graduate students. The ground-floor room shared by Betsy and Sharon Brandt, Room 5A, was in a corner near a stairway that led down to an exit door. A Campus Patrol officer unlocked the room for Schleiden, who went inside and flipped on the light. Brandt was long gone, ordered by the Campus Patrol to stay away until the state police had finished their investigation. She would stay with friends in Atherton until Christmas break began, then move to a different room with two other girls in January. Room 5A was on the small side for two people, Schleiden observed, but nice enough and kept scrupulously tidy by the two young women. Nothing seemed out of place. Schleiden opened Betsy’s desk and dresser, looked in her closet, and found notes she had written—but no formal diary—and many, many doodles. There was nothing among her effects that would have embarrassed Betsy’s mother. And nothing that provided any clue as to why someone might have wanted to plunge a knife into her chest.7

  Meanwhile, Corporal Brode had persuaded Lieutenant Kimmel to let him pursue his cockamamie theory that the country rapist who abducted the two teenage girls from the Nittany Mall in 1968 and 1969 might have killed Betsy, which meant Brode’s time and energy would be diverted from
more promising avenues of inquiry. It would not be the last wild goose chase by the state police, but in fairness, few major criminal investigations are without them. Lieutenant Kimmel brought many strengths to the Aardsma investigation, including experience in managing a big, high-profile case. But he brought significant weaknesses, too, including a certain tendency to want to “fight the last war” and a certain indifference to the sensibilities of the community where a crime occurred. Kimmel had been closely involved, as the sergeant in command of the Huntingdon barracks, in running the massive and successful manhunt in the spring of 1966 for the so-called “Mountain Man” rapist and killer, William Diller Hollenbaugh, a forty-four-year-old recluse who had terrorized people, especially women and girls, in and around the village of Shade Gap, about sixty-eight miles south of State College.

  The problem was that Kimmel’s tough tactics in the Mountain Man investigation had offended the community. After Hollenbaugh fired guns into the home of a young woman whose husband was at work, then broke in and raped her while muttering Bible verses, Kimmel ordered his investigators to begin checking the alibis of all the men in the area, inquiring with employers whether certain men had really shown up for work. Robert V. Cox, a reporter for the Chambersburg Public Opinion who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage, wrote in a subsequent book on the case that “dozens of men” were taken to Huntingdon for polygraph examinations. Many in the community considered their treatment by the state police, and especially by the polygraph examiner from Harrisburg, to be shabby and offensive. “And that caused an awful lot of trouble,” Sergeant George H. Keibler said. “When you go into a mountain area, there are different types people than there are in the city of Harrisburg. And you’d better treat them a little different. They didn’t do this.” The state police did not gain the trust of the local people, and the Mountain Man remained at large longer than he might have, with tragic results.8

  Matters came to a head on May 11, 1966, when Hollenbaugh forcibly abducted Peggy Ann Bradnick, age seventeen, at gunpoint while she and five younger brothers and sisters walked home from their school bus stop. He fled with her, dragging her by a chain around the neck, into the wilds of Black Log Mountain, part of the Tuscarora Mountains, where he had stocked three caves with cans of beans and corn and a supply of water. He told Bradnick that he had been spying on her for months. He wanted her to live in the forest with him and be his sex partner—a compliant, willing sex partner. “All I want is the sensation of touching a woman,” Hollenbaugh told her. “I never did that.”9

  Kimmel launched what is often described as the largest manhunt in Pennsylvania history, involving nearly 500 state troopers—nearly a third of the entire force in 1966—plus some 140 FBI agents, dozens of local police, and about 360 members of the Pennsylvania National Guard. Hollenbaugh, sometimes literally dragging the girl along, managed to elude them for nearly a week. Eventually, he lured his pursuers into a trap. Law enforcement was closing in on May 17, helped by two tracking dogs brought in from Arkansas, when Hollenbaugh shot and killed both dogs and then FBI agent Terry R. Anderson, who became the fifteenth agent in FBI history to die in the line of duty. The Mountain Man and his hostage escaped once again. But he died the next day in a shootout with state police and a fifteen-year-old boy, Larry Rubeck, who fired a .12 gauge shotgun loaded with a “pumpkin ball” shell out a window of his home at near point-blank range. Bradnick was rescued, and Kimmel wore the victor’s laurels.10

  The critical question was whether the case might have been resolved more quickly, and without bloodshed, if Kimmel had not employed harsh tactics in an attempt to gain information. The state police had become expert over the years at solving small-town crime that grew out of sexual depravity or dysfunctional relationships between the sexes. The troopers were small-town white boys (still all-male and all-white in the 1960s) and knew how to swim in that rural sea. They understood their neighbors, who often acted in predictable ways that helped them solve terrible crimes. But take them out of that milieu, or violate community hospitality by treating people harshly in an attempt to shake out information, and they were at a decided disadvantage.

  One has to believe that Corporal Brode’s pursuit of the idea that a country rapist had killed Betsy Aardsma was an attempt by him, at least subconsciously, to re-create the Mountain Man case. He probably believed that Lieutenant Kimmel would be receptive to the idea, since it echoed his greatest triumph. But that was the last war, not the current one. Kimmel, while allowing Brode to pursue his rapist theory, did not want him running the Aardsma investigation. As he gathered his thoughts on Friday night outside the autopsy room, he decided he needed Sergeant George H. Keibler, his most experienced investigator, in charge of the ground game, carrying out the role he himself had played in the Mountain Man case.

  When it came to criminal investigations, Sergeant Keibler was second to none. He was whip-smart, a master organizer who could keep track of the myriad pieces of information and evidence that accumulated during an investigation, while at the same time—without benefit of computers—analyzing that evidence and drawing insights and conclusions. He was one of fourteen criminal investigation specialist-3s in the state police, the best of the best. Keibler spoke in a police dialect all his own, a patois, where to mount an intensive investigation was to “run everything,” to name a suspect was “to get him into it,” and to clear a suspect was “to get him out of it,” all punctuated with frequent hells and damns. He had a wicked sense of humor and loved to kid his subordinates about their job performance, as Trooper Mike Simmers would soon learn. In many ways, Keibler was the right investigator for the Aardsma case, and if the case had not been such a mess when he arrived on the scene, he might well have solved it. The problem that evening was that Keibler was at his father’s hunting cabin, which had no telephone, and no one knew how to reach him. His wife and son were with him at the cabin, not at their home in Bellefonte.

  His biography was not that different from many other state troopers of the era. Nearly all of them were from small towns and farms, not big cities or suburbs. Keibler grew up in New Kensington, a small town on the Allegheny River northeast of Pittsburgh, where his father was an elected justice of the peace. He joined the US Air Force at age eighteen, spending three years in West Germany. Returning home in 1953, he contemplated his career options and eventually joined the Pennsylvania State Police. He had met a number of state troopers as a teenager when they came to his father’s office to file papers or appear at hearings. They seemed like good men.11

  After working his way through various barracks in western Pennsylvania, notably in Uniontown, which served a high-crime area, Keibler was promoted to sergeant and made commanding officer of the Rockview barracks on October 10, 1965. Here he would face new challenges. Not long after taking command, he was invited by Colonel Pelton, Penn State’s director of security, to observe a speech on campus at Rec Hall by Henry Cabot Lodge, who had been President Kennedy’s ambassador to South Vietnam, and was another symbol of the hated Vietnam War. Pelton was expecting trouble, and it came. A group of SDS students clashed with right-wing students from the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, who prevented them from going inside to protest Lodge’s speech. Keibler was stunned by the violence. Why was this happening? What should he do in response?12

  Under Keibler’s direction, the state police at Rockview began to monitor civil rights and antiwar activities on the Penn State campus. For example, when the university chapter of SDS held a supposedly secret meeting on January 31, 1967, to plan a demonstration the next day in front of Old Main, the state police had an undercover officer present. SDS had no idea they were being infiltrated. The demonstration was to protest President Walker’s refusal to respond to a letter demanding to know whether he planned to turn over their names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, which was investigating groups opposed to the Vietnam War. When the demonstration began at 11:00 a.m. the next morning, an underc
over agent was with the thirty-five students when they occupied a dean’s office and refused to leave. A detailed description of the day’s events was contained in teletype bulletins sent by the state police to Governor Raymond P. Shafer in Harrisburg.13

  But many of the protests had to do with civil rights, not the Vietnam War. Number one on the list of SDS and black student demands was a doubling of the black student enrollment at the main campus, from two hundred to four hundred—out of twenty-six thousand students—by the fall of 1968. They demanded one thousand black students by the fall of 1969, and 10 percent of the undergraduate population thereafter. Four days earlier, the university had put out a press release saying it was going to admit “a number [ten] of marginally qualified [emphasis added] black students from the Harrisburg area.” The implications of that statement were insulting and infuriating to black Penn State students. Their other demands included naming a building after Dr. King, bringing in more black athletes, and offering black literature courses in the university’s English curriculum.14

  If Keibler was sympathetic to the grievances of the Penn State black students, he did not let on. He was a by-the-books, law-and-order, Dragnet-style police officer, and much later, when he was in his eighties, listened regularly to conservative talk radio. He joked about the foibles of the black student organizations and was fond of telling a story about how he tracked their use of university cars (provided for recruiting new black students) through gasoline credit card receipts, discovering that they had attended an Angela Davis rally in Detroit; however, there was no evidence he harbored any personal animosity toward blacks. They lived in a different world he didn’t fully understand. As a law enforcement officer, he had to respond if they broke the law during their protests. It was as simple as that.15