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

by David DeKok

  Because the murder received national press coverage, Betsy’s friends heard about it whether they still had family in Holland or not. Peggy Wich, a close friend from Holland High School, had moved to Washington, DC, after graduating from Marquette University in Milwaukee and was working as a waitress in a hotel restaurant near Dupont Circle. She had last spoken to Betsy in August, right before she left for Penn State, but they had stayed in touch through letters. Peggy, in fact, had just sent her a letter, dropping it in a public mailbox near the restaurant. Her father heard about the murder in Holland and phoned her long distance with the devastating news. On Sunday, she worked the breakfast shift. When she went to take the order from her first customer, she saw he was reading that day’s New York Daily News. It was open to the same photograph of Betsy that Vande Water had used, under the headline coed is murdered in college library. Peggy managed to hold it together even as she inwardly reeled.4

  George Arwady, a journalist who had briefly dated Betsy at Hope College, where she spent her freshman and sophomore years, was shaken by the same story in the Daily News. Andrea Yunker, Betsy’s roommate during their junior and senior years at the University of Michigan, was at her parents’ house in Sturgis, Michigan. She came downstairs and walked into the kitchen, where her father’s transistor radio was playing. She was half listening when the news came on about a girl named Betsy Aardsma being murdered at Penn State. Andrea’s head spun. She called the radio station to confirm the news, then drove to a restaurant, ordered breakfast, and broke down when the waiter came. “My best friend’s been killed!” she sobbed.5

  Adults who knew Betsy were similarly shaken. Verne C. Kupelian, a former teacher at Holland High School and former owner/manager of the Edgar Allan Poe teen club, now lived in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. He heard about her death on the popular and ubiquitous Paul Harvey News and Comment, which ran on his local radio station at noon on Saturdays. Shaken, Kupelian made a long-distance call to another former student up in Holland, who confirmed the news. He could never understand why someone like Betsy would be the target of a murderer, chalking it up to somebody’s momentary violent outburst. “You should never be alone,” he said. “I kept telling kids that.”

  Among Penn State students still on campus, word spread slowly. There was no effort by the university administration to alert them to the murder, as there almost certainly would be on any college campus today. One of the main sources of information, the student-run Daily Collegian newspaper, had suspended publication until after New Year’s, as it always did at that time of year. The paper’s editors were huddling and about to decide, given the gravity of events, to publish on Tuesday, December 2. Local radio broadcasts in the State College area carried the news on Saturday, as did the Centre Daily Times newspaper in State College, but not all students listened to the radio or read the town newspaper. So the grapevine, with all its limitations, remained the most likely source of the news among students stuck on campus that weekend.

  Thomas D. Witt, a freshman journalism major, lived in Thompson Hall, a hundred yards west of Pattee Library. One of his classes actually met Friday afternoon, and in the early evening, he had an intramural basketball game at Rec Hall up the street. Still, Witt didn’t hear about Betsy’s murder until Sunday, when his roommate returned from break and said, “Hey, did you hear about that girl in Pattee Library?” Students who went home for Thanksgiving had a better chance of seeing a story about the murder than those who had stayed on campus. Marge Wissler, who lived near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, read about the crime Saturday night in the Lancaster New Era newspaper. The story was on page two: penn state coed dies of stab wound. The morning paper, the Intelligencer Journal, ran nothing until Monday.

  Back in State College, getting more investigators was Lieutenant Kimmel’s number-one priority. He had initially requested that ten criminal investigators be assigned to the case, more than the Rockview barracks could provide. That number rose to twenty by Monday, and then to forty a few days after that. The Pennsylvania State Police had about 1,600 troopers in 1969, compared to more than 5,000 today. Lieutenant Calvin Richwine arranged to bring in troopers from other barracks in Troop G, including Hollidaysburg, Bedford, McConnellsburg, Huntingdon, and Philipsburg. Some from Carlisle and Harrisburg in Troop H also were dispatched to help. As the out-of-town troopers arrived, they reported to a command post Kimmel had set up in Room 109 of the Boucke Building, which was across the street from the Ritenhour Health Center and a quick walk from Pattee Library. Some of the new arrivals were housed in the Holiday Inn, the same place Betsy Aardsma’s family was staying, and others at a different motel.6 Kimmel’s rationale was to throw a lot of men at the crime and hope that one of them came up with something; albeit on a smaller scale, this was the same approach he had used in the Mountain Man case in 1966.

  From the start, the Aardsma investigation was dogged by morale problems. Some of the troopers assigned to the case were upset at missing the start of deer and bear season, a much-anticipated event in rural Pennsylvania, which opened a half-hour before sunrise on Monday, December 1. They stayed four to a motel room and, not yet having their first union contract, received no overtime pay for their very long days and endless weeks.7 Trooper Tom Shelar was sent from Carlisle up to State College on Tuesday, December 2, the second day of hunting season, and recalled that he was peeved. But he, like the others, did his duty.8

  When the first troopers arrived on Saturday, Kimmel ordered them to search again for the knife, in case the killer had dropped or hid it as he fled. They searched in trash cans, on rooftops, and along logical escape paths through the campus, looking for anything of interest that might have been discarded. But despite several sweeps, nothing was found. Kimmel also arranged for video cameras borrowed from Channel 3, the Penn State television station, to be placed in the Level 2 stacks, in the hope of catching someone acting suspiciously. Given the size of video cameras in 1969, hiding them was no easy task. One was placed at the end of the aisle where Betsy was murdered but wasn’t very well hidden. Albert Dunning, news director of WDFM Radio, the student-run station, went to the stacks that weekend out of curiosity, hoping to better understand what had happened. Right away he spotted the cardboard box with a lens-size hole sitting on a top shelf and chuckled to himself.9

  As he drove home from his hunting camp on Saturday afternoon with his wife and son, Sergeant George Keibler thought about the murder case that, unbeknownst to him, was about to take over his life. During the year prior to ceding command of Rockview to Kimmel, he had attended a major-case school and conference at the state police academy in Hershey. The instructors were from the FBI as well as the state police, and they reinforced the dos and don’ts of handling a major case. Thus, he had a good idea of what he needed to do to keep the investigation running on track. But that didn’t solve the crime. His three years as commander of Rockview had given him as good an understanding as anyone in the state police of the social changes that were engulfing Penn State at the end of the Peace and Love Decade, which those days seemed anything but. The question now was whether Betsy Aardsma’s brutal murder had grown out of political radicalism or had welled up from the same foul miasma that had spawned the Michigan, Zodiac, and Manson Family murder sprees. Or maybe it was something else entirely.10

  After dropping off his wife and son at home, Keibler drove on to Pattee Library, arriving around 4:00 p.m. Trooper Ken Schleiden heard Kimmel tell Keibler that he had to run the Aardsma investigation from the inside, as the data collector and analyst, and not from out in the field with the detectives. This wasn’t quite what Keibler expected, and he wasn’t happy about it for a time, say those who know him. But Kimmel soon made it clear that Keibler was really running the show, even if he, Kimmel, was the public face of it. He ultimately allowed Keibler to go out on witness interviews whenever he saw a need to do so. “There was no one else who could have done what he did,” Simmers recalled. “And Kimmel knew that.” After visit
ing the crime scene, Keibler drove to the Rockview barracks, where he got a look at the pile of library books collected as evidence. They included eleven volumes of The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Controlled Fertility by Regine K. Stix. All had been scooped up from the floor at the murder site, or from adjoining shelves, and would not be returned to Pattee Library for nearly two years.11

  On Sunday, November 30, Keibler and Corporal Mutch went back to Atherton Hall to conduct a more thorough search of Room 5A. Sharon Brandt was still being kept out, and the room had been sealed and guarded since Friday night. Keibler wanted to assure himself that nothing had been missed in the first going-over but also wanted to determine whether any of Betsy’s personal effects could be given to her parents before they returned to Holland. The two investigators searched the room thoroughly, a process that took a couple of hours, but found nothing important.12

  They then drove to the Holiday Inn to meet Esther and Dick Aardsma and Ruth and Louis Cotts. Mutch recalled that the family was “down and desperate” but very much in control of their emotions. Keibler expressed his condolences, gave Mrs. Aardsma two personal items from Betsy’s room, and explained that they would have to keep her purse and the clothing she was wearing when she died. Then he settled down to the business at hand. He had a number of questions, standard, but intrusive nonetheless, about Betsy’s life. These were aimed at ferreting out any dangerous personal habits, such as drug or excessive alcohol use or promiscuous sex, and any possible enemies who might have wanted to harm her. They were standard because so often the answers led to the killer. This time, they didn’t.

  “I told the police that Betsy had no enemies,” Mrs. Aardsma told Daily Collegian reporter Ted Anthony many years later. She was upset, believing that Sergeant Keibler expected her and Dick to solve the case for him. And Esther was bitter about one thing. “My God,” she told Keibler. “Betsy came here to avoid Michigan.”13

  During her senior year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Betsy had faced a difficult decision. Her family urged her to get out of Ann Arbor and follow her boyfriend, David L. Wright, to Penn State, where he would start medical school in the fall. This was not so much for love but because they were worried sick about the serial killer then stalking and killing coeds in Ann Arbor and around nearby Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. The so-called Coed Murders, sometimes called the Michigan Murders, took place between July 1967 and July 1969 but mostly in the spring and summer of 1969. Pretty brunettes like Betsy were his favorite target. Reluctantly, she agreed to go.14

  Already on Friday night, Lieutenant Kimmel had decided that Sergeant Robert Milliron, a veteran criminal investigator from the Hollidaysburg barracks, and Trooper Ronald C. Tyger, from Philipsburg, would go to Michigan to see if there were any possible links between Betsy’s murder and the Coed Murders in Ann Arbor. By that time, John Norman Collins had been arrested and charged with the murder of the final victim, eighteen-year-old Karen Sue Beineman of Grand Rapids. The Michigan police at one time had been looking for a second man who supposedly helped Collins. Had this supposed accomplice somehow known Betsy and followed her to Penn State? The questions seemed endless, the answers less so. They would also conduct an in-depth investigation of her personal life aimed at laying bare who Betsy Aardsma really was. They would talk to everyone they could find in Holland and Ann Arbor who knew her. There had to be some reason she was murdered, some moral flaw that would lead them to the killer. This was another time-tested scenario from Murder 101 and something they always looked for, just as it made perfect sense to Kimmel to tell Shovlin to haul David Wright out of bed and question him that first night. Many murders boil down to sex or money. Money didn’t seem to be an issue here, so that left sex. But with whom?15

  The Aardsmas and Cotts flew back to Michigan on Monday afternoon, December 1. Betsy’s coffin went on an earlier flight and was taken upon arrival to the Notier-VerLee-Langeland Chapel, a funeral home on 16th Street in Holland, not far from the first home where she had lived as a young child. The family was still coming to terms with what they had seen and heard at Penn State. Ruth Cotts, who wrote thank-you notes for her sister, sent one to the Pattee Library staff at Penn State expressing bewilderment at what had happened to Betsy and displaying more than a hint of anger toward the university for allowing the murder to happen.16

  We know you share in some small part our sorrow in this tragic event. We hope and pray whoever committed this heinous crime may be found, to protect other innocent young girls. . . . Could there not be some way of keeping non-students from entering the library? Some of Betsy’s friends said there were “hangers-on” who used the library as a refuge.17

  Grief was more private in Holland than in some places. Cards and casseroles might arrive, but a stream of visitors to a house in mourning was rare. Families tended to retreat behind closed doors and drawn shades until the funeral and burial were over. The idea of a Jewish shiva or an Irish wake, with toasts by friends to the recently deceased, would have been deeply foreign, even offensive, to many in Holland. That was their culture. They were not an effusive people, at funerals or in any other way.

  The Aardsmas struggled with preparations for the viewing on Tuesday night and funeral on Wednesday. They were in turmoil. Dennis Wegner tried to pretend Betsy’s murder was a bad dream. But when he saw her body at the viewing at the Notier chapel, the bubble burst and he fell to pieces.18 Kathy Aardsma, Betsy’s younger sister, was hurt by the reaction of her teachers and counselors and fellow students at E. E. Fell Junior High School, who acted as if nothing had happened. No one from the school reached out to her. Esther Aardsma began a slide into deep depression, and Dick Aardsma reached for liquid comfort, a problem that was bad before Betsy died and would grow worse over the years.19

  Reverend Gordon Van Oostenburg recognized that this was no ordinary funeral; no funeral of a young person ever is. But Betsy had been murdered, and the shock and horror had left the many who knew her in Holland reeling. On Sunday, November 30, he departed from his prepared sermon and instead preached on James 4:14, a verse that is widely interpreted as a warning to Christians not to be arrogant, that they are living on borrowed time and subject to God’s will as to whether they live or die. He had preached similar sermons after the King and Kennedy assassinations the previous year. Later, he began thinking about what he would say at the funeral. Even though he had been the pastor of Trinity for seven years, he did not know Betsy well and would have to reach out to others to define her.20

  David L. Wright, her boyfriend, was torn over whether to attend Betsy’s funeral, which was just days before his first semester final exams at medical school. His parents convinced him he needed to go, and he conceded afterward that he would have felt bad if he hadn’t. He also sent a dozen roses. His psychiatrist father, Dr. Donovan Wright, accompanied him to the service. He told David he counted only eleven roses in the bouquet, but he then realized that the twelfth had been placed in Betsy’s hands in the coffin, which was open prior to the service. Several of David’s fraternity brothers from the University of Michigan came to the funeral, as did several of Betsy’s friends from Hope College and U of M. One of her high school boyfriends, Tom Bolhuis, served as one of the pallbearers. He hadn’t seen her in several years and was surprised when he received a call from Betsy’s parents.21

  Just before the service began, David and the Aardsma family entered the church from a door on the left near the front of the sanctuary and sat in a front pew. Trinity was a big old church, built in 1911 in the traditional cathedral style of many churches of the era. Today it was nearly full. All eyes were drawn to the pulpit, which was in the middle of the chancel in front of three high-backed chairs and a large wall cross. Many Christian churches place the pulpit off to one side so as not to block the altar, but Reformed Churches do not have traditional altars. When Reverend Van Oost
enburg mounted the pulpit, he towered over the congregation like a figurehead on a sailing ship, surveying the stormy seas ahead. Now he would try to explain the death of a young woman who had grown up in his church but who he did not really know very well. She had been influenced in her moral beliefs by what she heard there but had gone further into the world than many of her elders found comfortable. Betsy had embraced what was good about the 1960s, especially the fight for civil rights for blacks, an end to the war in Vietnam, and the beginning of new rights for women. In the end, uncertain about what to say, Van Oostenburg fell back on doctrine and Scripture and preached about her death no differently than he would any other. It did not go over well.22

  One of Betsy’s friends from the University of Michigan, he informed the mourners, told him that Betsy had been worried enough about the Coed Killer the previous spring that she had thought about her own funeral if she was murdered. And she wanted an Easter resurrection message to be preached. So Reverend Van Oostenburg told them they should celebrate her entrance into Heaven. Esther Aardsma had provided him with a copy of a poem, “Why Do I Live?,” which Betsy had written during her senior year in high school. The poem compared her God-centered moral values with those of a more self-centered, worldly ex-boyfriend. “I am living in preparation for death / What I live for will last,” the pastor read from the poem. Expanding on his Sunday message, he declared that the poem meant Betsy had accepted both the reality of her death and the fact that her death would be God’s will. Of course, whether that remained her attitude four years later, when she was in love with David L. Wright, was unknown, but Van Oostenburg proceeded as if it was. He did not reach out to those who considered her violent death at a young age, and her loss to the world, to be an unspeakable tragedy.