by David DeKok
Chapter 9
Frustration on the Road
That Betsy Aardsma was a good girl, a smart young woman dedicated to literature, art, and progressive causes, was briefly mentioned in news stories in the days following her murder. An Associated Press story published that first Monday suggested that had she lived, Betsy might have become “a dedicated doctor’s wife, an artist, a professor of English literature, or a teacher on an Indian reservation.” An unidentified friend told the reporter that Betsy was very interested in minority groups and loved black literature, especially the work of James Baldwin, the gay black American author who had moved to France in 1948 to escape his home country’s racism, then largely absent in France. After her freshman year at Hope College in her hometown of Holland, Michigan, she had spent a couple of weeks working on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Someone else remembered her love of sketching. One of her professors, not identified in the story, said she “had the deep sensitivity of an artist for others’ feelings—and a keen sense of observation in addition to her natural abilities.” She had been at Penn State only eight weeks but had still managed to make a number of close friends and impress teachers in that short final act before she was murdered.1
Yet after this brief burst of humanizing news coverage, Betsy receded back into victimhood and, eventually, rumor. She had no family in Pennsylvania, no one who could be her advocate, her voice from beyond the grave. College friends can only fulfill that role for so long. The state police were as befuddled as everyone else over the apparent lack of a motive for her murder. Kimmel hoped the troopers he sent to Michigan would be able to uncover something, anything, that would tell him why the killer had plunged a knife into her chest. They would find little but frustration as they drove from town to town in the Wolverine State.
Esther Aardsma, during her brief sojourn in State College after the murder, had voiced suspicions about a student named Darryl whom Betsy had dated at Hope College and who, subsequently, like her daughter, had transferred to the University of Michigan. Betsy had dated a number of Hope men, mostly without incident, but her brief relationship with Darryl, her mother remembered, had ended badly. Esther told police that he had “attacked” Betsy one evening in the lobby of Voorhees Hall, where she lived on campus. Betsy indeed saw the incident as sinister and scary, although her freshman-year roommate, Linda DenBesten, thought it was just overly dramatic behavior on Darryl’s part. There doesn’t seem to have been any physical violence. In any case, Betsy had taken up with him again at the University of Michigan at the beginning of her junior year. In a letter to a friend, Betsy said that the young man had changed and was now “a beautiful person. The fact that my parents don’t approve adds a certain intrigue to it all,” she wrote. It didn’t last long, but there was no more drama.2
Upon hearing about the ex-boyfriend, Corporal Mutch and Lieutenant Richwine phoned the Michigan State Police around 11:00 a.m. on December 1, even as Kimmel was concluding his first news conference in the Boucke Building. They spoke to Detective Sergeant George Smith and asked for his help. Could he gather as much information as possible on the ex-boyfriend’s whereabouts around the time of Betsy’s murder? And could the Michigan State Police assist in other ways in a background investigation of Betsy? “They have talked with the victim’s parents, who allege she is a good girl. However, they would like to know more about her,” Smith wrote in his memo about the call. He agreed to help and conducted several interviews of Betsy’s friends and ex-boyfriends during the coming weeks. Darryl soon was eliminated as a suspect.3
The two Pennsylvania state troopers dispatched to Michigan shortly after the murder, Sergeant Robert Milliron and Trooper Ronald Tyger, were sent mainly to look for possible links between John Norman Collins and the Coed Murders and the murder of Betsy. For that reason, they went first to Ypsilanti, where Detective Sergeant Smith worked out of the Washtenaw County Crime Center of the Michigan State Police. Wash-tenaw County, which surrounded the two university towns, was where the Coed Murders had taken place. Their second goal was to search for anything in Betsy’s past that might lead them to the killer. Smith arranged for Detective Ken Kraus of his department and Deputy Gene Alli, a Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputy, to accompany the pair while they were in the Ann Arbor–Ypsilanti area. Collins, who had been arrested the previous August for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman, was in jail awaiting a trial that would begin the following summer. He had not been formally charged with any of the other seven murders that police believed he had committed, but the string of murders had stopped with his arrest.
Still, for all police knew, there could have been a copycat killer at work. Indeed, one of the murders long attributed to Collins—that of Jane Mixer—is now officially attributed to a male nurse, Gary Leiterman, who was convicted of the crime in 2005 and sentenced to prison for life.4
Because the records released by the Michigan State Police were redacted, it is not possible to name all of the people to whom Milliron and Tyger spoke during their stay in Michigan, which lasted from about December 1 through 5. They certainly spent time in Ypsilanti that first day, speaking to Smith, and on December 2, according to a memo by Smith, “made contact” with someone of interest at her job in Ann Arbor. At some point, they also interviewed David L. Wright’s friends in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity who were still in Ann Arbor. In the afternoon, they were driven by their handlers to the state police station in Ionia, not far from the state’s reformatory, which had the same forbidding “Big House” look as Rockview penitentiary back home in Pennsylvania. There they were passed off to Detective Herb Brown from the Grand Haven station, who was their escort when they did interviews in the Holland area.5
The Michigan State Police, under intense political pressure to solve and close the Coed Murders, kept close tabs on Milliron and Tyger during the trip. The two Pennsylvanians came to believe their hosts were fearful they would inadvertently do something to screw up the prosecution of John Norman Collins. “They assigned a criminal investigator with us. And boy, he got us up in the morning and put us to bed at night,” Tyger recalled.6
They visited the Aardsmas at home, probably on December 4, the day after the funeral, finding them still in shock and bewildered. They could offer nothing that might help. The detectives went to the Hope College campus and interviewed professors who had known her during freshman and sophomore years. They all said much the same thing: that she was a good girl, nice, fun-loving but not a troublemaker, and smart as a whip. No one thought Betsy smoked pot or used any other drugs. “She was clean as a whistle,” Tyger said. He found it deeply frustrating.7 Strangely, one thing they did not do was attend Betsy’s funeral, even though they were in Holland. Tyger said they were too busy doing interviews during the day and consolidating their notes at night to spend several hours at her funeral and burial, watching for anyone who might seem out of the ordinary.
On Friday, December 5, they were back in Ann Arbor interviewing one of Betsy’s apartment mates from her senior year at the University of Michigan, probably Terrie Andrews. Detective Sergeant Smith, who wrote up a report for his own department, said the only valuable information gleaned from the conversation was that one of their other former apartment mates, Andrea Yunker, knew Betsy better than she did. Yunker, Andrews, and Olga Lozowchuk, all University of Michigan students, had shared a two-bedroom apartment with Betsy at 441 South First Street in Ann Arbor, a fifteen-minute walk from Angell Hall and the Diag in the heart of campus. Angell Hall was where the English Department was located, and the Diag, a large plaza, was ground zero for antiwar and other protests by leftist students. Betsy and Andie had shared one of the bedrooms, Terrie and Olga the other. It was late in the day, and the detectives didn’t have time to talk to Yunker but obtained a promise from Smith that he would look her up as soon as he could. They flew back to Pennsylvania the next morning, frustrated that they had not been able to find anything useful.8
“Now as far as Betsy, we broug
ht her up from the day she was smacked on the bottom to the day people thought [incorrectly] she was having an epileptic fit,” Tyger said, meaning the day she died. “We didn’t leave any stone unturned when we did the background on her. That’s one of the first things you do, is get a background on the young lady or the victim. To find out what there was, and possibly put a motive to their killing. We couldn’t find one.”9
David L. Wright had checked his mail at school the day after the murder and found a last letter from Betsy. She had mailed it from State College on Friday, the day she died, and here it was, in his mailbox in Hershey on Saturday. Letters from her had arrived almost daily during the fall. She sent him letters and sent her friends letters in the way a young woman in the twenty-first century sends e-mails or texts. It made sense. Stamps were cheap, but long-distance telephone calls in 1969 were not. Betsy carried on an epistolary romance with David and epistolary girl talk with her friends Peggy Wich, Olga Lozowchuk, and Jan Sasamoto. Peggy and Jan had graduated with her from Holland High School, and Jan had gone on to the University of Michigan, where Betsy joined her two years later. For a young man, opening a handwritten letter from his girlfriend could be sweet (or bitter, depending on the content). He might catch a hint of her perfume and wonder what she was doing at that moment. But for David, Betsy’s last letter was only a reminder of her violent death and what he had lost.
Detective Shovlin was not through with him—not by a long shot. After David returned to Hershey from the funeral, Shovlin and his partner began visiting him at the medical school almost daily, asking the same questions in a dozen different ways. It reached the point where Dr. George T. Harrell, dean of the medical school, told David to mind his studies and told the officers not to come on campus again. He did not want him subjected to further questioning. Wright didn’t obey. “I just sort of went against his rule, just because I was so devastated by the whole thing and wanted to find out as much as I could,” he said. Shovlin and the other officer still came two or three times a week, but they met him at a diner on Route 322 across from the medical school. They bought him lunch and pumped him with questions. Finally Wright asked, “Am I a suspect?” and they laughed and said “Not at all.” But he did not fully believe them. At the medical school, the rumor circulated that Betsy may have been a “hippie” involved in drugs at Penn State, and that her murder was somehow related to that. Like the police, the public demands a logical explanation for murder and reaches for the tried and true, whether true or not.10
David’s father flew to Harrisburg a few days before Christmas, and together they drove home to Illinois in David’s car. Leaving Hershey on Route 322, they stopped first at the Rockview barracks. David asked to see Sergeant Keibler, whom he had last seen when he went to State College to see the Aardsmas after they came to bring Betsy’s body home. Keibler was at his home in Bellefonte but hurried over to the barracks when he heard the student wanted to talk to him. “I think maybe he thought I had some new information, but I just wanted to get an update because it had been a month since I talked to him,” Wright said.11
The state police came to believe that David L. Wright had no role in, nor foreknowledge of any plans for, Betsy’s murder. Keibler says that the repeated, intensive questioning was “to get him out of it,” meaning they had to clear him or arrest him, not leave him in boyfriend limbo. About two months into the investigation, in a little-noticed interview with a student newspaper far from State College, Lieutenant Kimmel proclaimed that Wright was innocent. “As to the report that the victim’s boyfriend may be involved, we can say that he has been interviewed many times and that he is not connected with the slaying,” he told Charly Lee, a reporter for The Nittany Cub, the student newspaper at Penn State University Behrend Campus in Erie in early 1970.12
But Wright still felt the eyes of the public upon him. On the Penn State campus, the rumor was that the murder weapon was either an ice pick or a surgical instrument, and wouldn’t a medical student have access to surgical tools? Andrea Yunker, when interviewed by Detective Sergeant Smith on December 12, blurted out “David did it!” then could not explain why she felt that way beyond the fact that a woman’s killer is often her boyfriend or husband.
Smith interviewed Yunker in Room 135 of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan, where she worked as a librarian. She talked freely about about Betsy’s funeral, which she had attended with Olga Lozowchuk, about David and Betsy’s relationship, and how David first met Betsy. They had become “informally engaged,” the report said, quoting Yunker. But David was not her first boyfriend. Betsy had dated at least three other boys, including Darryl, the drama king. There was also a naval ROTC student at Michigan who was now aboard the USS Chicago, a missile carrier then in home port at San Diego. The third boy she described as short, five-seven or five-eight, and slim, no more than 130 to 140 pounds. He had blond hair and blue eyes and acne scars on his face. Yunker said this boy had tried to get serious with Betsy but was rebuffed.13
Possibly on the same day, Smith also interviewed Lozowchuk, who was then a graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit. She had told police earlier that she had corresponded with Betsy about twelve times between May of 1969, when they had graduated from Michigan, and the end of October. Although Lozowchuk thought she had kept the letters, when she arrived at the interview, accompanied by her parents, she confessed that she could not find them and believed she had thrown them away. Lozowchuk did confirm the names of the three young men Yunker said Betsy had dated at U of M in addition to David L. Wright.
On December 12, Lieutenant Kimmel announced that he was sending two detectives back to Michigan to conduct further interviews with Betsy’s friends and family. “We still have a lot of work to do on her background,” he said. “We have a lot to learn about her former associates, her schools, her attitudes, and the like.” His use of the term former associates struck an odd note, like something one would say about a criminal suspect. That wasn’t his intention, of course, but he seemed in some ways then to be flying on autopilot. By now, two weeks had passed since the murder, well beyond the forty-eight-hour window in which most murders are solved, if they are solved. This time it would be Corporal Mike Mutch going to Michigan with Tyger. They drove out to Holland and did not have handlers from the Michigan State Police.
It is unclear exactly when Keibler heard about a former assistant professor of English at Penn State, Robert G. Durgy, who was rumored to have had some kind of a relationship with Betsy or, at the very least, an obsession with her. Durgy was a promising young literary scholar of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian author, and had just edited a critical translation of Notes from Underground, which was Dostoevsky’s 1864 novel about an ugly, sick, and nasty man living on the fringes of society, a man who does horrible things yet revels in his vanity. “I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret, abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night,” the Underground Man said in the novel, “actually conscious that today I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful, cursed sweetness, and at last—into positive, real enjoyment. Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that.” Durgy’s book had been published earlier in 1969.
Durgy was from Grosse Pointe, an affluent suburb of Detroit. He was five years older than Betsy and had spent most of the 1960s at the University of Michigan after enrolling as a freshman in the fall of 1960. He graduated in 1964 and was admitted to the well-regarded graduate English program at Michigan to continue studying English language and literature.14
He completed his master’s degree in eighteen months, and in early 1966 married Martha Travis, a librarian. They had two sons fairly quickly. His wife remembers they had “a good marriage. Bob was a lot of fun, very clever, very witty, loved his children
. We were both very young, so you don’t have a lot of patient wisdom. But apart from that, we had a good social life, good friends.” He began work on his PhD right away and was recognized by the English department as a rising star. Everything seemed to be going his way. By the time he was hired as an assistant professor in the English Department at Penn State in the fall of 1969, he still needed to finish his dissertation and have it accepted to receive his doctoral degree in comparative literature.15
There was a demon stalking Durgy, though, and it was clinical depression. He had struggled with it for years and attempted suicide around age twenty-one, possibly during a summer break, as there is no obvious gap in his academic transcript. Hospitalized for a time, he recovered “beautifully,” his wife said. When he moved to Penn State with his wife and children in the summer of 1969, even buying a new car for the new job, the demon returned with a vengeance. Martha Durgy blamed the stress of the new job and the pressure to finish his dissertation, which has taken down more than one graduate student. The family lived in Bellefonte, where the real estate was more affordable than State College. Durgy began teaching undergraduate English classes—not the sort of classes that a graduate student like Betsy Aardsma would have taken—but soon found himself unable to get up and face his students. “This anxiety set in, and he kept trying to teach. He said to me, ‘I just get up there and make no sense; I just can’t do it,’ ” his wife recalled.16
Martha Durgy doesn’t believe her husband had an affair with Betsy Aardsma at the University of Michigan or Penn State, and he may not have even known her, despite the rumors that swirled. Betsy arrived at the University of Michigan as a junior in the fall of 1967 and majored in English. It is possible that they knew each other from their time in the Angell Building. “I certainly never heard her name,” said Martha Durgy. “She wasn’t an important person, or even a familiar person in our lives.”17
