by David DeKok
This did not sit well with a number of Betsy’s grieving college friends and some in her family, who were unwilling to take only the eternal view and saw nothing to celebrate about her murder. Her college friends, in particular, knew Betsy as a modern, educated, outward-looking young woman who had embraced the cultural and political changes of the 1960s and longed for a life in the outside world. Now, Reverend Van Oostenburg seemed to be dragging her back into the insular, Calvinist, small-town church culture in Holland from which she had longed to escape. The pastor had no ill intent, but some were angry about the sermon even forty years later.
“I still recall her funeral with a great deal of anger toward Reverend Van Oostenburg,” said Dennis Wegner, her brother-in-law. “Rather than dealing with why someone who was young and making a difference in the world was murdered, he merely dusted off his fill-in-the-blanks, ‘old lady dies of cancer,’ stock funeral sermon. He seemed to say it was not Christian for us to grieve, because Betsy was in heaven, and we should celebrate her life. That is, not only did I feel bad, but the preacher said I should feel bad about feeling bad. It took me a long time to find a healing perspective on that.” Olga Lozowchuk, one of Betsy’s apartment mates during her senior year at the University of Michigan, found the sermon “not very personal” and “not very comforting at all.”23
Linda DenBesten, who had been Betsy’s freshman-year roommate at Hope College, was dumbfounded and then furious as she listened to the pastor. “It made me so angry. And I remember leaning over to her mother after the funeral. I said, this is not God’s will. And she said, I know it, I know it.” DenBesten poured out her tears and anger in the car as her husband drove them home to Illinois after the funeral. The one good thing about the funeral, she said, was that she finally had a chance to meet David L. Wright, “who seemed just as decent as I would have expected him to be.”24
Perhaps nothing Van Oostenburg could have said that day would have eased the grief that Betsy’s friends and family were feeling. The death of a young person upsets the natural order of things, and her friends wanted an affirmation of her worthy life and lost potential rather than Calvinist theology that probably was perfectly appropriate when, as Wegner put it, an old lady died of cancer. Barbara Timmer, a friend of Betsy’s from Hope College, who is Van Oostenburg’s niece, defended her uncle as a loving and compassionate man who was never harsh or judgmental. She did not attend the funeral but found the reaction of Betsy’s friends who did to be upsetting and hard to comprehend. But she knew Gordon Van Oostenburg in a different way than they did.25
Tom Bolhuis remembered the physical shock of placing his hand on one of the six handles of her coffin and helping to carry it to the hearse. Her body was taken from the church to Pilgrim Home Cemetery, final resting place for generations of prominent and ordinary Dutch Americans in Holland.
Esther Aardsma continued to send David birthday presents for many years. Thirteen-year-old Kathy Aardsma took it upon herself to keep up Betsy’s habit of sending him a letter nearly every day, not realizing that it kept the pain of her sister’s death alive for him. David Wright called them “a very, very nice family. It’s just a tragic thing. . . . You sort of want to forget something like that,” Wright said. “But boy, she kept that up for about two years.” He would soon meet another woman and move on but could never truly escape the shadow of Betsy’s murder, which he did not talk about to his own children until 2008, after a series by the author on the murder ran in the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News.26
Part II: Searching for the Killer
It was a damn shame, but we worked hard. We worked months on that. We had a hypnotist and everybody else in there. There were six hundred people we interviewed who were in the library at the time, but absolutely nothing.
—Lieutenant Calvin Richwine1
Chapter 7
The Running Man in the Core
As a light snow fell on State College, Lieutenant Kimmel arrived at the Boucke Building on Monday, December 1, 1969, to hold his first news conference about the Aardsma murder. The snow, which had been falling since the night before, made the roads slippery but pleased thousands of deer and bear hunters who had trooped into the woods of Centre County an hour before dawn for the start of both seasons. Now it would be easier to track their prey, whether by footprints or blood. Kimmel had neither footprints nor blood to lead him to Betsy Aardsma’s killer, save for the one tiny drop of her blood on the library wall. He was depending on Sergeant Keibler to study the evidence and determine the path to follow.
About forty people were waiting for the news conference, although the journalists were far outnumbered by state troopers, Campus Patrol officers, and university officials. Kimmel told the press that he was particularly eager to identify and question the two men—yes, two—whom Marilee Erdely claimed had come running out of the Level 2 stacks shortly before she had discovered Betsy’s body.1
Nearly all of Penn State’s twenty-six thousand students had returned the previous day from Thanksgiving break, had learned that one of their own had been brutally murdered, and were clamoring for information. Kimmel had decided to tell the public what he knew, or at least what was safe to release. The problem was that some of the things he believed that morning were later proven to be wrong or misleading.
The only witness to the immediate aftermath of the slaying the state police had found thus far was Marilee Erdely. She had been in shock after finding Betsy’s body and may well have thought she saw two men running at her. At the news conference, Kimmel did not call the two mystery men suspects in Betsy’s murder, saying only that “we consider them very important for questioning.” What the press was never told was that Keibler eventually concluded that one of the men almost certainly was the killer and that the other was Joao Uafinda, the student from Mozambique who had followed the killer around the Core. Erdely did not know Uafinda, and he had not yet come forward. Nor had Richard Sanders Allen, the man at the copier, who would not find out that Keibler wanted to talk to him for many months. Because no obvious clarification was ever issued, the “two men” narrative became embedded in the public mind. So did the time of the murder. Kimmel told reporters it had occurred between 4:30 and 4:45 p.m. Keibler, after analyzing the available evidence, changed that to 4:55 p.m., but Kimmel’s time was the one people remembered.
The lieutenant’s frustration at the lack of solid leads was evident at the news conference, as was his growing realization that the state police, after four years of crackdowns on political dissent and illegal drug use, had an image problem on campus. Perhaps he remembered what had happened when his men got too tough with the locals during the search for the Mountain Man. At the press conference, Kimmel urged any student or professor with information about the murder to contact his investigators as soon as possible. “We want it understood that we are not coming around talking to people as suspects at this time,” Kimmel said at the news conference. “We don’t want anyone to think that this is a stigma on them if somebody comes to talk to them. We have a serious problem as far as we can tell at this point.” The “serious problem” Kimmel referenced was the lack of material evidence. He called it a “crime without clues.”2 All they had were the books, including the pornography, a soda pop can collected at the scene, the splash of Betsy’s blood on the wall by the staircase, and the body tissue samples taken at her autopsy. Kimmel had no physical evidence that could be used to identify the killer.
Trooper Simmers took the books and the soda pop can to the state police crime lab in Harrisburg later in the day. Normally, the evidence would have gone to Troop G headquarters in Hollidaysburg for iodine fuming, the classic method of raising fingerprints. But the state police had recently begun using the new ninhydrin method, which could only be done in Harrisburg. The technicians did find fingerprints on the soda can, but they matched the fingerprints of one of the Campus Patrol members at the scene that night. Nothing was found on the books. Betsy
had not been raped, so the semen samples collected on the floor by Mary Willard were a curiosity at best, proof, however shocking, only of the sort of perverted behavior that went on in Pattee Library. Even if the murderer was one of the perverts, the semen didn’t prove much since there had been no rape. All they had to go on was what Erdely had told them.3
Marilee, who shared an apartment with another girl at 133 North Patterson Street, exactly a mile west of Pattee Library, was not identified by name at the news conference. Instead, Kimmel referred to her as “the student” or “the girl student.” He was concerned about her safety, since the killer was at large, and she was the only witness they had. For several weeks, according to the man she later married, Erdely was provided with security, including troopers who accompanied her to classes and waited outside the door.4
Kimmel dismissed any significance to reports by Penn State coeds that they had been “bothered” by men, as he put it, in Pattee Library in recent weeks. This unwanted attention was a serious matter, including groping, flashing, and public masturbation, which were all forms of sexual assault. But Kimmel downplayed the incidents as routine. “You have reports of peeping toms, men following girls, bumping into them, talking to them, all the time in colleges and communities everywhere,” he said. His skepticism was common to many policemen, physicians, and other male authority figures of the time.5
Of course, sometimes events seemed to lend support to those attitudes. On the morning after Kimmel’s first news conference, there was concern that the killer had tried to strike again, this time at Clarion State College in the picturesque small town of Clarion, ninety-five miles west of State College. The victim of the attack, an eighteen-year-old freshman psychology major, claimed to have been in bed in her dorm room around 2:30 a.m. on December 2 when the assault occurred. She said a strange man pressed a pillow over her face and slashed her on the neck and abdomen with a double-edged razor blade, then fled into the night. The victim, bleeding and seemingly terrified, went to another room for help. Her fellow students took her to the college dispensary for treatment of what turned out to be superficial cuts. She was released after treatment.6
The state police were called only at 9:00 a.m., the victim claiming she delayed because a college official in the dorm told her not to call police. Trooper William E. Lees, the investigating officer, could find no other student in the dorm who had seen or heard anything that night. Increasingly skeptical, the state police announced that they were going to ask the victim, who was recovering from her wounds at her parents’ house outside Pittsburgh, to take a polygraph examination. She apparently flunked and ultimately confessed that she had inflicted the cuts herself and made up the account of the attack. She dropped out of Clarion after her confession.7
During the three weeks he was in charge of the Aardsma investigation, Lieutenant Kimmel was at the Boucke Building nearly every day, accompanied by Lieutenant Richwine. On that first Monday, he asked Sergeant Keibler to compile and write the official investigative report on the murder. Keibler was provided with a clerk-typist, a woman from Troop G headquarters, to help organize a comprehensive filing system for the never-ending river of information that was flowing in from the forty investigators, converting it to three-by-five index cards and assembling those in ways that made sense and could easily be retrieved later. It was also Keibler’s job to pick the brains of the investigators, to analyze the information they uncovered and suggest where to look next. In an era when personal computers did not exist and mainframe computers were something for NASA, not the Pennsylvania State Police, George Keibler was the human computer of the Aardsma investigation. When he found that two plus two didn’t equal four, he would make a note and advise Kimmel to send someone to check further. Whenever new information replaced the old, some of the main investigative report, which eventually ran to more than 1,700 pages, had to be rewritten to keep the overall narrative accurate. Kimmel’s job was easy in comparison.8
Some of Keibler’s investigators, including Mike Mutch and Ronald Tyger, were veteran detectives. Others, like Mike Simmers and Ken Schleiden, were young and had long careers ahead of them. Tyger welcomed the presence of the younger men, even while boasting that seasoned investigators could “look beyond the horizon.” The problem was that some of the troopers on the Aardsma case had no practical investigative experience at all. They were traffic cops who had been drafted into the case because Kimmel wanted more feet on the ground.9
That posed a problem. Keibler, who had a better understanding of the university culture than Kimmel, worried about sending troopers into the different world of the Penn State campus who had never dealt with faculty and their prickly sensibilities. “You were reaching out and getting a trooper who may not have been to college, didn’t know a damn thing about it, and we sent him to interview a professor,” Keibler said. “[Some troopers] are not used to college-type people and the bullshit you get. You know in interviewing the average faculty member, he wants to be in charge of the interview. You see, the troopers aren’t used to him being in charge, and here comes Assistant Professor So-and-So and smoke comes out of his butt. He’s going to tell the trooper what to do. . . . And the professor’s looking down at him, and the professor is in charge. And here’s a trooper trying to interview a professor, and he doesn’t know how to go about it, really. My academic opinion on the thing is that people in universities look down on someone who doesn’t have their level of education. Now there’s a way to handle that and a way not to handle it. But it causes problems when you bring people in who aren’t aware of that.”10
Keibler recalled the time he investigated the death of a Penn State graduate student in chemistry who committed suicide by swallowing cyanide. “His dad was a military officer, the Vietnam War was going on, and the kid felt his dad was disgracing him. Wrote about four or five suicide notes and never destroyed one, that was the strange thing,” he said. One of the dead student’s teachers, a full professor, came to see Keibler. “You probably think suicide is wrong,” the professor said. Keibler admitted that yes, he did. “ ‘Well, that’s the difference between you and me,’ he said. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, Johnny went out and sat under a tree and took cyanide. He weighed all the things he had that were good, and all the things that were bad. This outnumbers this.’ ” Keibler considered the professor’s argument to be nonsensical and held it up as an example of the sort of things the state police ran into on the Penn State campus that they didn’t typically encounter elsewhere. “Lord knows what you’re going to find,” he said.11
Many years after his role in the Aardsma investigation was over, Keibler conceded that he had about thirty more investigators than he could effectively use. It was Kimmel who wanted more boots on the ground, not him. “See, the more people you get, the more problems you get. It’s a shotgun approach. If you get ten people—and I could handle that very easily—you can get your briefings. Briefings are the most important thing that a policeman can do with a group. If you arrive at eight o’clock in the morning and you’re working for me, and the other guy comes in and he goes out that door and we don’t get together, we’ve lost him. And again, I can understand the bringing in of forty. There’s a helluva lot [of investigative work] to do. You had a trip to Michigan to start with. You’re in a situation where you’ve got an awful lot of people that you’re to interview.” He worked from dawn till dusk and beyond, as did Lieutenant Kimmel, whose wife recalled that he didn’t come home to Huntingdon for many days.12
A murder investigation on the other side of the country was about to bump the Aardsma case out of the headlines. Later on December 1, Los Angeles police chief Ed Davis announced arrests in the Tate-LaBianca murders, in which seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski, had been stabbed, slashed, or shot to death on the evenings of August 9 and 10, 1969. Davis said a “roving band of hippies” was believed responsible. Two of the suspects, Charles “Tex” Wat
son, twenty-four, and Patricia Krenwinkle, twenty-one, were already in custody. A third suspect, Linda Kasabian, nineteen, was still being sought.13 All three were members of the so-called Manson Family. The cult leader, Charles Manson, thirty-five years old, was a short and wiry ex-con turned hippie guru. Davis said four or five other suspects, including Manson (although he wasn’t mentioned that day), were already in custody in Independence, California, the county seat of Inyo County.14
The arrests followed months of intensive police work that ran the gamut from brilliant to incompetent. Although the crimes took place in upscale neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the Manson Family members had been arrested at their hideout near Death Valley National Monument, more than two hundred miles northeast of the city. Manson had led his followers to this barren land in the fall of 1968, telling them it was a place where “things aren’t so crazy.” He mesmerized them with talk of finding the “Hole in the Desert,” a supposedly bottomless pit beneath Death Valley that led to a beautiful underground world complete with light, fruit trees, and a flowing river. Manson and Paul Watkins, his nominal second in command, spent their days searching for the Hole, driving stolen dune buggies through Death Valley at breakneck speeds. Susan Atkins and two other girls from the Family occasionally panhandled in Shoshone, a tiny desert oasis and crossroads about fifty miles from the Barker Ranch, where the Manson Family was hiding out. It had a store, restaurant, motel, gas station, and a high school that served the disparate and scattered children of the desert, plus an easygoing, live-and-let-live lifestyle. There were always tourists passing through during the cooler months.15
