by David DeKok
In considering any of these scenarios, it is important to remember the near silence in which the crime occurred. Nothing was heard except a sound like a fist hitting a chest, which suggests that Betsy Aardsma was struck down completely by surprise by someone who could approach her without raising alarms. That seems unlikely in the interrupted-tryst scenario, but perhaps not if she had happened upon someone she knew reading pornography and masturbating at one of the carrels. Her friends think she was more likely to have pretended not to see it and moved on, searching for a book—but perhaps not before registering a look of disgust that was observed by the man at the carrel, who then knew that she knew. Given the lack of physical evidence linking anyone to the porn books, however, it was only a theory, albeit one of the more interesting ones.
There seemed to be no end to the craziness. A woman turned over several letters allegedly written to members of a Church of Satan cult in the region. Keibler did not identify the woman beyond saying she was the mother of one of the cult members. They were followers of Anton LaVey, who organized the original Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966. The letters were written by the local chapter’s archpriest, who lived in Dubois, about sixty miles from Penn State. In the letters, he talked about wanting to commit a human sacrifice. The mother heard of Betsy Aardsma’s murder and wondered if she had been the victim sacrificed to Satan. Keibler and his detectives looked at that story for a while but concluded that the archpriest’s proclaimed intention to sacrifice a human was more braggadocio than anything else. Nevertheless, “we couldn’t ignore it,” Keibler said.17
Keibler also believed in the possibility that some people would concoct elaborate stories because they were trying to send the police a coded message about who the killer was. That was why he ordered an investigation of a report that three students with a Ouija board had come up with the name of the killer. The state police eventually figured out who the students were and concluded it was just a story. “You didn’t know if these people were trying to give you a legitimate name and they didn’t want to come forward, so they said they got it off a Ouija board. So that’s why we spent a lot of time on that,” Keibler said.
There were blackly humorous moments. A State College woman who was a church organist was practicing on Thanksgiving evening, the night before Betsy was murdered. She reported seeing a shadowy figure, a man she didn’t recognize, moving through the church. A few days later, she concluded that he must have been there to murder her, but for some reason didn’t do so and then killed Betsy the following night. Her husband decided to pass along details of the incident to the police by writing an anonymous letter and driving ninety-six miles to Indiana, Pennsylvania, to mail it. It was addressed to State College police chief John Juba, who turned it over to Keibler. The state police had a good laugh when they read it, because the man had left his name off but included his return address. Keibler sent Trooper Thomas L. Jones, one of the troopers sent up from Harrisburg to assist with the investigation, to interview the man. “I said, ‘Jones, when you go down to this guy to interview him, he’s going to want to know how the hell you found him. Don’t you dare tell him. Just say, we’ve got our ways!’ ”18
One of the more sensitive areas of the Aardsma investigation was how to approach the clergy and psychiatrists serving the twenty-six thousand students on the Penn State campus. Sensitive, because under a Pennsylvania law adopted in 1959, most clergy (except for self-ordained ministers and denominations where all members were considered clergy) could neither be compelled to give testimony nor provide it voluntarily without the permission of whomever had gone to the pastor to “get it off his chest.” It was much the same for psychiatrists. In practice, Keibler said, the courts did not take an absolutist approach to the privilege, interpreting the law as granting a privilege unless a patient or penitent revealed plans to commit a specific crime, such as a troubled husband saying that he was going to kill his cheating wife on the following Tuesday when the kids were at Grandma’s house. Keibler had to walk a fine line and try to persuade the counselor that he or she would not be linked to the information. He told them, “I’m not going to go down and knock on the guy’s door and say, ‘Doc So-and-So sent me.’ That’s not going to happen.” Perhaps not surprisingly, given the wording of the 1959 law, most clergy believed they had a complete privilege, Keibler said. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, tended to accept that they had to report impending crimes, although they varied in their degree of cooperation.19
Because of this qualified privilege, police normally shied away from approaching members of either profession for help. But as the Aardsma investigation hit roadblock after roadblock, the temptation became greater. Keibler said he did talk to some pastors during the Aardsma investigation. His method was to gently persuade them to pass along names of any Penn State students who had shown a sudden interest in religion and seemed to be in a troubled frame of mind.20
There were a number of psychiatrists in the State College area in 1969, some on the staff of the Ritenhour Health Center, and others in private practice. Keibler worked closely with both of the Ritenhour psychiatrists (the normal complement was three, but there was a vacancy). One of them insisted to Keibler that all his patients were “real good,” but as he said it, Keibler noticed the baseball bat beneath his desk. In the end, he believed the psychiatrists helped him within the limits of their professional code. He had his men check all the Penn State students who had dropped out of school at the end of 1969 for no apparent reason, including those who left for psychiatric reasons. “Hell, yeah, you do that,” he said. “You have to do that.” At least two students who had been barred from campus for serious psychiatric problems had been seen on campus the day Betsy was murdered.21
One thing Keibler never did was make a direct, public appeal to the Penn State faculty to come forward and report suspicious behavior by any of their students. He avoided this because the faculty was, in some instances, even more anti-police than their students. “They don’t want it known [emphasis in original] that they are in any way, shape, or form cooperating with police,” he said. When they did want to talk, it might be to discuss something that was of interest to them but of little relevance to the investigation. Trooper Lee Fisher recalled being sent to talk to a professor who, in the sort of situation Keibler had predicted, sought to take control of the interview. The professor, it turned out, had invited Fisher to find out whether the state police were looking for people with the supposed “criminal chromosome” in their genetic makeup. “I thought, geez, we can’t go test everybody for this criminal factor, this criminal chromosome factor,” Fisher said. The gap between the faculty and police was nearly as wide as the chasm separating the cops and many of the students.22
One of the more salacious rumors was that Betsy Aardsma had been a nude model for the art department at Penn State, and that her murder somehow grew out of that. To those who knew her, it made no more sense than her being a narc, although few denied her beauty. Keibler said the rumor arose early in the investigation and took “a helluva long time” to chase down. The experience seemed to have permanently soured him on art students. “They’re nuts. I can’t understand a guy sitting here, and he has a nude model up there, you’d think he was sketching a nude model, but he’s really sketching an apple, or if he’s sketching a model he has a knife through her,” he said, adding: “There’s more psychological problems with art students than anything in the world.” He said they questioned four or five art students until finally concluding that there was nothing to the nude modeling rumor.23
That trail led them, however, to another of the odd characters who occupied the fringes of the Aardsma investigation. Bill Spencer, who was forty-one, was a sculptor who lived with his young wife in the former Waddle School outside State College. His claim to fame was that he and his first wife, Lena Spencer, had cofounded the Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1960, where in June 1961 they had hosted the young and unknown Bob Dylan i
n his first concert outside New York City since moving east from Minnesota five months earlier. The two-night stand was a spectacular failure. Bill Spencer, furious, went onstage to reprove the crowd. “You may not know what this kid is singing about and you may not care, but if you don’t stop and listen, you will be stupid all the rest of your lives. Listen to him, dammit,” he implored. By the time of the murder, Spencer, a notorious tomcat, had split from Lena for a Skidmore College coed and decamped to Boston. He later got a job teaching art at a high school in upstate New York but was fired for his eccentricity. He had persuaded the school to let him bring some junk cars onto the school grounds in the name of art, then let his students attack them with sledgehammers. Later he moved to the State College area, where his latest wife was a graduate student in English at Penn State.24
Spencer got Keibler’s attention when he phoned one day and announced that he had solved the Aardsma murder. A trooper was dispatched to interview him at home. When he walked in, the trooper couldn’t help but notice a painting above the sofa showing a naked couple having sex. Spencer saw him looking and commented, “That is the ultimate release. You know what that is? That’s my mother, and I’m having sex with her.” The trooper held his tongue, nodded, and took notes. Spencer’s claim to have solved the crime stemmed from allegedly being in State College on November 28 around the time of the murder and supposedly seeing the murderer walking fast or jogging away from the university in a westerly direction. How he knew it was the murderer was not really explained, beyond his perception that the young man was acting in a suspicious manner. Spencer offered to sculpt a bust of the murderer and give it to Keibler, which he presented at the Boucke Building about eight days later.25
Keibler concluded that Spencer was “wacky as a coon.” His young wife, he recalled, was beautiful and knowledgable. “And she said, in no way is he seeing anybody or has anything [to do] with this. She basically said, ‘Just disregard him.’ ” Eventually, they did, and State College became a way station for Bill Spencer on his downward slide from minor footnote in the history of Bob Dylan to oblivion. The state police, unable to avoid spending time investigating Spencer, were no closer to solving the mystery of Betsy Aardsma’s murder.26
Perhaps every unsolved murder, too, causes people to notice strange coincidences, sometimes long afterward. Take the matter of the Rolling Stones song “Midnight Rambler” and its seeming, though unproven, relation to Betsy Aardsma’s murder. The band had released its album, Let it Bleed, in the US on the morning of November 28, 1969. “Midnight Rambler,” which was loosely based on the crimes of the Boston Strangler in the early 1960s, was on the album and had been performed in concert since the summer of 1969. Their US concert tour had begun on November 7 and they had performed the song at least fourteen times, including in Philadelphia on November 25 and in Baltimore the following night.
On the night of Betsy’s murder, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones again took the stage, this time at Madison Square Garden in New York, and again sang “Midnight Rambler.” You can hear that particular performance on their live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, which was released in September 1970. It is a creepy, nine-minute, rock-and-roll tour de force. The song is sung by Jagger from the perspective of a serial killer who lurks in the shadows and concludes with the chilling words, “I’ll stick my knife right down your throat, baby, and it hurts!” That was close to how Betsy had died. Had a deranged fan on the Penn State campus decided to kill someone in tribute to the song? It is, as they say, an interesting possibility, but there is no evidence that her killer was a Stones fan of any variety.
Keibler’s men began to show the strain. Hours were long, morale was low, and those troopers who were brought in from long distances, and were now living four to a room, wanted to go home. There was no overtime pay to make the endless hours seem worthwhile, especially with no break in the case. “No one was sharing information,” Trooper Simmers said. “No one was completing the report.” What he meant was that some investigators withheld things, hoping to use the information to advance their own careers if they could personally break the case. A detective with a hot lead might write that he had interviewed someone but omit the interesting details the witness provided. Not everyone did this, Simmers cautioned. But some did. “There was no sharing, particularly with the guys that came in from Harrisburg, from Philadelphia, and those CIS guys, they were called. Criminal investigation specialists.”27
But it happened among the Rockview troopers, too, he said. Corporal Brode was notorious. “If Dan Brode had a lead, it never went into the report. He kept it for himself,” he said. “Dan Brode had an ego, and he wanted to solve that case. He would actually mislead the other investigators onto a wild goose chase. Oh, yeah.” Keibler agreed that Brode would do that, but said it is a common trait among police officers. He didn’t believe Brode withheld anything important in the Aardsma case. “He didn’t have anything to hide,” Keibler said. Brode continued to believe that the country rapist was a likely suspect in the murder of Betsy Aardsma. He was an eternal optimist, telling Buzz Triebold of the Department of Security every time he saw him that “We’re going to clear this thing up in such and such a time. And I would ask, based on what? Well, [Brode would say], I think we got a pretty good suspect lined up, and once we can talk to so-and-so and this person and that person, I think we’ll be able to get this narrowed down. Well, time went on and on and on, and that never materialized, of course.” Keibler agreed that this sounded like Brode. “If you’d say, ‘How you doing on the case?,’ he’d say, ‘Oh, it’s just a matter of time; we’ll have that sucker.’ ”28
Chapter 11
Trouble in Old Main
Penn State coeds and their parents were consumed by fears of a killer on the loose. Duty officers in the women’s dorms fielded scores of telephone calls from parents during the weekend after Betsy’s death, wondering if it was safe for their daughters to return to campus. Many students gave considerable thought to whether it was safe to continue using Pattee Library, and more than a few concluded it wasn’t. Some women drafted their boyfriends as bodyguards if they couldn’t avoid going into the stacks.1
Barbi Stine, a reporter for the Daily Collegian, remembered the murder of Betsy Aardsma and the aftermath as “horrifying but surreal. How could that happen? Everybody stayed out of the stacks, for sure.” A freshman in the fall of 1969, Stine didn’t go back into the stacks until her senior year, when she had an unavoidable need for a book shelved not far from where Betsy was murdered. As soon as she found it, she ran out of the stacks and smack into a graduate student, who subsequently became her boyfriend for about a year. “But I was just so freaked out by being up there, because they had never caught the guy. So everybody was pretty nervous that way, I guess,” Stine said.2
Rebecca Craven, a senior at Penn State in 1969, said most students felt safe before the murder, believing nothing bad could happen in Happy Valley. She worked as a volunteer leader in a high school youth ministry, had gone home for a Thanksgiving weekend of activities, and didn’t hear about the murder until she returned. She had often studied by herself in the stacks, but never did so again. Neither did many of her friends, especially after Betsy’s death began to appear to be random, not the revenge of some deranged old boyfriend. “We had feelings of dread, that none of us were safe,” Craven said.3
Albert Dunning, news director of student-run WDFM Radio, was struck by how Betsy seemed like such a “wholesome, studious, red-blooded all-American girl, with no enemies.” How does someone like that get murdered? Tom Gentzel, a 1969 graduate of State College Area High School and a freshman at Penn State that fall, said the murder was so shocking because murder was so rare in State College. The violence of her death and the fact that the police had no solid leads set everyone on edge. “No one knew if this was an isolated incident,” Gentzel said. “Or whether this was the start of other violence.”
To no one’s surprise, female stud
ents in English 501, the research methods class that was the proximate cause of Betsy being in Pattee Library that day, showed “great reluctance” to return to the library, according to Joukovsky. They talked about it in class and in private meetings with him. This was a problem, because the final assignment for the semester required a lot of research in the library. “We had to cut some of the students some breaks in terms of their not being willing or able to go in,” he said. “We encouraged them to go in together in groups, which they mostly did.”4
A rumor took hold among students at Penn State that Betsy Aardsma had been the victim of an “Alphabet Killer.” There were a couple of variations of this rumor. One was that the killer would target the student who was first in the campus directory for each letter of the alphabet. Betsy, with a family name that began with two As, was indeed the first student in the Penn State directory that fall. The other variation was that the killer would target all women whose last name began with A. Neither prediction came true, but they reflected the student state of mind that December.5
Students who knew Betsy, such as her English 501 friend Linda Marsa, struggled with grief, a phenomenon that in 1969 was not as well understood as it is today. “In those days, we didn’t know about grief,” Marsa told writer Kevin Cirilli decades later. “It took me several months to come out of this funk. It was a pretty bad experience, and I blocked it all out.” The librarians were forced to relive their own emotions about the murder with every news story in the Daily Collegian.6
The feelings of Carl Jackson, director of libraries, regarding Betsy Aardsma’s death can only be imagined. On Monday, December 1, their first day back at work after the Thanksgiving holiday, he huddled with Charles H. Ness, his assistant director for public services, and Francis E. Hooley, his manager of business operations, to discuss Betsy’s murder and what should be done. He asked them to calculate the cost of expanding the hours of the security guards for the rest of 1969 and all of 1970. Ness costed out a number of options, ranging from full- to part-time coverage in Pattee, and also the specialty branch libraries on campus. Jackson also asked Hooley to pull together all documents that “present a fair picture of our concern for both patron and employee in the area of safety-security.” Hooley reported back on December 3 that he had located a fair number of memos and letters.7
