by David DeKok
And then abruptly, at the beginning of 1969, Keibler was no longer commander of the Rockview barracks, although he remained in charge of criminal investigations. It all had to do with state police regulations and the department’s byzantine seniority rules. The state police used a complex formula based on the number of troopers at a station, the number of calls handled by that station, and the number of calls anticipated based on the area’s population to determine when a station headed by a sergeant should instead be headed by a lieutenant. Rockview had reached that critical mass. There had been eighteen troopers assigned to the barracks when Keibler became commander in 1965, and two of those were driving examiners. By 1968, there were thirty-three, mainly because of the Penn State political troubles and a rise in drug trafficking.16
So, who would be the new lieutenant? It could never be so simple as moving up the sergeant who was already there—Keibler, who was thirty-eight years old and one of the state’s best criminal investigators. Kimmel, who was forty-four, had recently been promoted from sergeant at Huntingdon to one of three lieutenants at Troop G headquarters in Hollidaysburg. In the end, the state police commanders chose Kimmel. Keibler, who wanted to stay in criminal investigation work and didn’t want to move his family, accepted the change. Kimmel would be fine. He just didn’t know the territory.17
Frustrated in his attempts to figure out how to contact Keibler, Lieutenant Kimmel phoned Keibler’s mother in the wee hours of the morning, waking her up. He pleaded with her to tell him how George could be reached. He desperately needed him to lead the investigation of the murder of a Penn State coed. She finally relented, giving him the phone number of a neighbor. Around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, November 29,the neighbor knocked on the cabin door and brought Keibler back to his house. Kimmel explained over the phone what was happening and asked him to return and take over the investigation. The sergeant agreed to be there by mid-afternoon on Saturday.18
Chapter 5
Miss Marple Arrives at the Library
In the early morning hours of Saturday, November 29, long before Keibler returned, a very short, plump, and elderly lady strolled purposefully into the Level 2 stacks of Pattee Library. She greeted the troopers who had been there all night, took off her coat, and began to look around as if she owned the place.1 The indomitable seventy-one-year-old chemistry professor, Mary Louisa Willard, the Miss Marple of State College, had arrived to help her boys find whatever material evidence might remain after the unfortunate contamination of the crime scene early Friday night. She was certain that something was still there to find.2
Lieutenant Kimmel, appalled by what had happened, had phoned Willard on Friday night and asked for her help. He probably wondered whether he should send a car to her home at 363 Ridge Avenue to fetch her, because every police officer knew she was the worst driver in town, barely able to see over the wheel as she drove down the middle of the road. But when it came to gathering evidence at a crime scene and analyzing it in her lab, she was second to none. Willard was the daughter of Joseph Willard, the late chairman of the mathematics department at Penn State and namesake of the Willard Building. She had been born on the Penn State campus in 1898, in what was later called Moffat Cottage, torn down in 1965 to build the library’s new research wing. And she had been a member of the Penn State faculty, active or emeritus, for fifty years.3
Mary Willard had obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Penn State and her PhD from Cornell University. At Cornell, she studied under Professor Emile Chamot, a master of chemical microscopy, and probably from him picked up the bug for using science in the public interest, especially crime solving. In 1899, Chamot proved that most wallpaper sold in America contained dangerous amounts of arsenic, bad if your toddler liked to lick the wall or if you were a fireman battling a house fire. In 1902, he helped the police in Syracuse, New York, convict a seventeen-year-old girl of murdering her late husband’s brother with strychnine after he spurned her advances. A court had the body exhumed, and the Cornell professor found enough poison in him to kill a horse.4
Lieutenant Kimmel’s request for Willard’s assistance was not unusual, even though under departmental regulations all crime scene analysis was supposed to be done by the state police crime lab in Harrisburg. She had been doing this work for the Rockview barracks since 1946, when her brother had become district attorney. The troopers got around the rules by having District Attorney Willard request that Professor Willard do the work, a subterfuge that subsequent DAs continued. Troopers often sent their DUI blood tests to Willard for processing so they didn’t have to drive them down to Harrisburg. Willard was “highly regarded” by the Rockview troopers, according to a 1954 FBI memo.5
But they didn’t simply use her because it was convenient. An internal FBI memo of February 20, 1961, sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, accused the state police commissioner, Colonel Frank McCartney, of pushing use of the Harrisburg lab by local police departments, “despite the fact he knows he does not have qualified experts.” State troopers in the field were under no illusions about the lab’s competency, the memo continued, “and whenever possible endeavor to have local police work on the same case and send the evidence to the FBI Laboratory.” Or, in Rockview’s case, by Mary Willard. In 1967, the District Attorneys’ Association of Pennsylvania complained to Governor Raymond Shafer that the facilities of the Pennsylvania State Police Crime Laboratory were “simply inadequate,” though the complaint centered on understaffing rather than technical incompetence. Shafer replied that his administration was working on an ambitious plan to raise state police pay, build a new crime laboratory, and establish a statewide laboratory system that would ensure that crime lab services were not so far away.6
Kimmel knew it could be hours before a technician made it up to State College from the capital, and there had been too many mistakes and delays already. Plus, Mary Willard was a better crime scene investigator—she called her work “criminalistics”—than anyone in the troop, or anyone sent up by Harrisburg. Each troop had a couple of officers who were called lab people, but in practice they could do little more than take pictures and process fingerprints. They had no training in the sorts of things Mary Willard could do blindfolded. We can only imagine how different the investigation of the Betsy Aardsma murder might have turned out if Willard had arrived in Pattee Library before the Campus Patrol.7
After all, she had been doing criminalistics since 1932, when law enforcement agents brought her bootleg liquor for analysis in the waning days of Prohibition. She had even been called as an expert witness for the defense in the original murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard in 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio. This was the notorious case that spawned The Fugitive, first as a television series from 1963 to 1967 and then as a feature film starring Harrison Ford in 1993, about a physician wrongly convicted of his wife’s brutal murder. In 1961, Willard declared emphatically to the Washington Post that Sheppard was innocent. “Those marks on her body could only have been made by a left-handed man,” she said. Sheppard was right-handed. Helping to solve murders was Willard’s life’s work. “There are so many kinds of murder,” she told a reporter for the Lake Charles (Louisiana) American Press in early 1965, when a retrial of Sheppard was looking more likely. “But I’m not talking about someone taking a gun and shooting someone. I’m talking about the cases such as the Sheppard case, that I was called as a technical consultant on. Here you had a case where fibers, hairs, blood, soil, and many other things had to be analyzed.” A jury in the second trial found Sheppard not guilty, and he was freed in 1966, after ten years in prison.8
After Betsy’s autopsy was completed early Saturday morning, Trooper Simmers took some of the tissue samples back to the Rockview barracks and put them in the refrigerator. He then picked up Trooper Ken Schleiden at Betsy’s room in Atherton Hall and drove with him to Pond Lab to pick up Willard and take her back to Pattee Library. This time she brought along a black light, beca
use black lights cause bloodstains to glow. Since Betsy had been stabbed, it made sense to her to look for blood, even though very little of Betsy’s blood had left her body.9
Willard was not squeamish about her work. Joe Willard, her nephew, recalled driving his aunt to burned houses, wrecked cars, and other places where her services were needed. One of his earliest memories was driving her to the Scranton area so she could pick up a badly charred set of human remains. He loaded them in the trunk of the car and drove her back to State College and her laboratory on the first floor of Pond. She was unflappable. Given what she was about to find in the Level 2 stacks of Pattee Library, that was a good thing.10
The first state troopers to arrive on the scene Friday night had conducted an intensive search of the bookshelves near the crime scene, looking for the murder weapon. They didn’t find it. The troopers also looked for fingerprints, one of the few technical areas of crime scene investigation in which they had training. A soda can with a partial print was found near the murder site, but it turned out to have been left by one of the Campus Patrol officers. Nearly a hundred library books, including the ones that fell to the floor when Betsy was stabbed to death, were boxed up as potential evidence. Some of Betsy’s belongings, including books and her coat, were retrieved from her study carrel by Charles H. Ness, associate director of public services for the library.11
What happened next should have been no surprise, given the vice problems in Pattee Library. Three rows over from where Betsy was slain, toward the back of the room, was a carrel on which two glossy, illustrated books featuring hard-core heterosexual pornography lay open. “Hard-core” at that time had a specific meaning for American law enforcement. It was a designation reserved for photographic portrayals of sexual intercourse involving vaginal, anal, or oral penetration. This particular book had been published in the Netherlands, where pornography had been legalized earlier that year, and carried an eye-popping price tag for 1969 of $10. This was well above the typical price for porn, which ranged from $1.50 to $2.25 (a non-porn paperback at the drugstore might cost 50 to 75 cents). They were simply too expensive to casually abandon. Whoever owned them had left in a hurry, so agitated that he had forgotten about them. Or didn’t dare take the time to circle back.12
Trooper Simmers said a subsequent search of the the area turned up twenty to thirty other cheap paperback porn books, known in the trade as “sex pulps.” They were stuffed in the shelves among the scholarly titles. Sex pulps were once soft-core pornography, more like today’s R-rated movies, but in the late 1960s had begun to include more blunt language about sexual acts, descriptions once limited to hard-core books.13 They, too, were boxed up for transportation to Rockview. There was no telling how long the sex pulps had been there. The US Supreme Court, in the Stanley v. Georgia decision of April 7, 1969, had legalized possession of pornography in the privacy of one’s own home, but possession in a public library still fell well outside of what the court said was legal.
During her search, Mary Willard turned on her black light and began crawling along the floor of the library near where Betsy was murdered, shining the light over every square inch, and providing a running commentary to the troopers. Something glowed, and she recognized it not as the dark black color of dried blood, but the unmistakable yellow-green fluorescence of human semen. She continued her search and found many other semen spots on the floor throughout the Level 2 Core. Then she lifted the light to the shelves, to the books themselves, and was stunned to find semen stains on the books, too. The troopers were in a state of shock. “It looked like [they] had orgies on the floor,” Trooper Ronald Tyger recalled. Schleiden remembered that the area “was covered.” Simmers said, “You cannot imagine the amount of semen.” Betsy Aardsma had wandered into a dark place where men with broken souls masturbated onto library books.14
Finally, Willard stood up and announced that she needed to gather up anything that was on the floor at the murder site. And because she had none of the specialty vacuum suction devices or other collection tools used by police today, she was going to wipe the floor with her skirt and take it back to her laboratory for analysis. She looked inquisitively at the young troopers. “Do you boys have girlfriends?” she asked. Informed that they did, she wasted no time doffing her skirt, then got back down on her hands and knees and used it to wipe the floor as the troopers turned away in embarrassed disbelief. She carefully gathered it up, put on her long coat, and walked out of the library and back to her laboratory, as if an old woman walking across campus without a skirt was the most natural thing in the world. She was secure in her belief that her methods were sound and would be accepted in the Centre County court and, indeed, in most courts of the land.15
“She was the expert on anything and everything,” said former district attorney Charles C. Brown Jr., later a county judge. “Handwriting? She was the expert. Blood analysis? She was the expert. You name it, she was the expert. Of course, you look back now and say, wait a minute! Somewhere along the line, she couldn’t have been the expert. But she qualified in court all the time when I had her . . . and virtually no defense attorney ever really challenged her. Now in this day and age, she’d be challenged on everything, and probably rightfully so, on some of her areas of expertise. But she was a delightful person, and she just charmed the hell out of everybody.”16
In the days that followed the Aardsma murder, Mary Willard made several more trips to the library. One of the specimens she analyzed was a spot of blood found on the wall by the stairs that ascended to the main floor from the Level 2 Core. It turned out to be Betsy’s blood. Keibler believed it had somehow been smeared on the wall when the ambulance attendants tried and failed to get the stretcher up those stairs. But even he considered this a “very strange” explanation. Had the killer gotten a little of her blood on his hand and then touched it to the wall ever so slightly as he fled up the stairs?17
Chapter 6
Bringing Her Home
Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away.
—James 4:14, King James Bible
Dick and Esther Aardsma barely slept. There had been the call from David Wright’s father around 3:00 a.m., and at dawn on Saturday, November 29, the telephone rang again. This time it was the Pennsylvania State Police officially informing them that a small knife wound had been found in their daughter’s breast and that she had been murdered.
After Reverend Van Oostenburg left on Friday night, Esther phoned her sister, Anna Ruth Cotts, who lived in Michigan City, Indiana, to pour out her grief. Mrs. Cotts and her husband, Louis, were as devastated as the Aardsmas. Betsy was their favorite niece. She was always somebody’s favorite something, so why would anyone want to kill her? Ruth told Esther that of course they would accompany her and Dick to State College to bring her body home. By chance, their son Ron, a Delta Airlines pilot, was visiting. He offered to fly back to Michigan City early the next morning in his own small plane. Then he would fly them up the Lake Michigan coast about a hundred miles to Holland to pick up the Aardsmas. Then he would fly them all back to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where they could catch an Allegheny Airlines flight to Pittsburgh and on to State College. His work schedule precluded him from taking them all the way.1
Cotts touched down at Tulip City Airport, which was less than three miles from the Aardsma home on East 37th Street. Carole and Dennis Wegner, Betsy’s sister and brother-in-law, stayed in Holland to look after Kathy, who that morning phoned her friend, Arlene Pelon, who lived a couple of doors down, to tell her she couldn’t play because her sister had died. Esther and Dick were ashen and “absolutely silent” during the flight back to Chicago, Ron Cotts recalled. “Almost didn’t say a word.” Later that day, after transferring in Chicago, the four adults arrived at Black Moshannon Airport on a mountain plateau near Philipsburg, about twenty miles from Penn State. They checked in
to the Holiday Inn in downtown State College and were visited by some of Betsy’s friends, including Sharon Brandt, who told them about her life at Penn State. One of them mentioned the perverts in Pattee Library. The Aardsmas also arranged with Koch Funeral Home for the return of Betsy’s body to Holland on Monday.2
Most of the Penn State community, especially students who went home for the Thanksgiving weekend, was focused on the last Nittany Lions football game of the regular season, which they could watch on national television that afternoon. Coach Joe Paterno and his team were in Raleigh to play North Carolina State, a team with a 3-5-1 record. Penn State, already picked to play Missouri in the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day, won its twenty-first straight game, 33–8. It was another triumph for the Charlie Pittman–Franco Harris ground attack that all fans believed would surely lead the team to the national title. Football was everything at Penn State. Paterno was already a legend.3
Betsy’s murder jumped out from the front page of the Holland Evening Sentinel on Saturday afternoon. Randy Vande Water, city editor of the Sentinel, was a member of Trinity Reformed Church and knew the Aardsmas, though not well. It was rare at that time for anyone from this small city of twenty-five thousand to be murdered, especially a girl like Betsy from a good, Dutch, middle-class, churchgoing family. Saying you were Dutch in Holland was like saying you were Irish in Dublin. Not everyone was of Dutch descent or had a Dutch name like Aardsma—just 85 percent of them. Vande Water included Betsy’s University of Michigan senior portrait with the story. This haunting photograph became her death mask, reprinted by many newspapers and magazines over the next four days and, indeed, for the next four decades. It was a particularly striking image of her, making her look beautiful and even a little glamorous. That description would have surprised and amused her friends, who were used to her casual, artsy ways, but it was cemented in place for all time by that photo.
