by David DeKok
Maurer lives today in Maryland and is retired from the super-secret National Security Administration [NSA]. He will not talk about the Betsy Aardsma case or the suspicion that fell upon him. “I’m not interested in talking to anybody about this anymore, because I feel like it was a tar baby that I got involved in, and the less I have to do with it, the better,” Maurer told the author. “Sorry, but I’m not talking to anybody.”5
When troopers Tom Shelar and Lee Fisher went to Maurer’s room in Atherton Hall to talk to him shortly before Christmas break, they had no reason to believe it would be anything other than a routine question-and-answer session, similar to those they were conducting with other members of the English 501 class. They did not have or need a search warrant, Keibler said, because they were not looking for anything. Shelar, the senior investigator, began chatting with Maurer, who admitted he had been in the Level 2 stacks of Pattee Library, in the English literature section, around the time Betsy had been murdered but had not seen her. They continued to talk. Meanwhile, Fisher, who had been on the force only a year, glanced around the room. His eyes were drawn to words carved into the arm of a wooden chair. Moving closer to get a better look, he saw that it read here sits death in the guise of man. The carving looked fresh. Fisher took Shelar aside and told him about the chair. Maurer casually admitted that it was his handiwork—that he had carved it because it was “a neat saying,” Shelar said. The troopers took notes and left.
Shelar went to find Trooper Tom Jones, another senior investigator, and went back to interview Maurer at greater length. This time Maurer admitted he had asked Betsy out on a date and been turned down. Jones asked him what he had used to carve the inscription in the chair, and Maurer told him he had a knife. “Why do you own a knife?” Jones asked. “To cut cheese,” Maurer said. He didn’t seem at all nervous, even though he had to have known how the knife, his interest in Betsy, and his presence in the Pattee stacks near the murder site not long before Betsy died might be construed by the detectives.6
Keibler remembers Jones returning to the Boucke Building, “so damn excited I thought he was going to fall over on the floor. I said, ‘What the hell?’ He said, ‘I got him!’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, you got him?’ ” Jones told him about the crude inscription on the chair and of the knife used by Maurer to make the carving. According to Keibler, Jones acknowledged that he and Shelar didn’t have solid evidence, “but that has to be him,” meaning the killer of Betsy Aardsma.
Lieutenant Kimmel was just as excited, and he ordered that Maurer be polygraphed and put through the wringer. The examination was scheduled for after New Year’s Day but before classes resumed at Penn State for the winter term. Jones and Shelar drove to the Maurer farm in Northumberland County and picked him up. They drove him up Route 147 to Sunbury, where they crossed the bridge over the Susquehanna River and drove to the state police barracks outside Selinsgrove, where the polygraph examiner from Harrisburg had set up his bulky machine. Maurer was not accompanied by anyone—not by his father, not by a lawyer.7
Jones and Shelar grilled Maurer hard. “He was respectful, and very cool,” Shelar said. “We actually accused him of the murder, and he was very cool in denying it. We always figured that any normal person would be aggravated, excited if they were accused. Not him! He just calmly said he didn’t do it, even though he admitted being in the [English] Lit stacks at the time of the murder. But he said he didn’t see her.”8
Only then was Maurer hooked up to the polygraph. The two troopers were stunned when the operator came out and told them he had passed the test. “We always figured he beat the operator, not the machine,” Shelar said. Back at Penn State, Kimmel paced the floor nervously, waiting for a call he expected from Jones, telling him that the student had confessed and that they were driving him back to State College for arraignment. He was bitterly disappointed when they arrived back at Rockview and told him Maurer had passed the test. Simmers witnessed the aftermath of the meeting. He was in the kitchen, which was next to Kimmel’s office. “If anyone thought they had the cat in the bag it was those three,” Simmers said. “And Kimmel come [sic] out and his chin was down to the ground. [They] just thought for certain that they had him, and they couldn’t get him to talk.”9
Robert W. Sams, second son of Henry W. Sams, chairman of the Penn State English Department, remembers his father talking about the Aardsma investigation. “I remember sort of toward the tail end . . . it came up again, and what I remember clearly is Dad saying, ‘Well, they know who did it. They just don’t have enough evidence.’ That was his impression at the time. I got the impression that he knew who they suspected, but he didn’t say. I got the feeling that he knew enough detail about the possible suspects to either make a judgment or to have been told who they were suspecting.”10
The police admitted they had no evidence—just a heaping pile of suspicion that even today raises eyebrows, but which, as late as 2007, when it was considered again, was not enough to move authorities to take any further action. “Well, basically, during the time I had it [the investigation], there was never any evidence that [Maurer] should be arrested,” Keibler said. “There was no evidence that he was a high suspect. It’s that simple.”
Chapter 13
Sleep Mode
There comes a point in any failed criminal investigation when it goes into sleep mode, which can be defined as a couple of detectives still looking and hoping for a break even if their superiors are skeptical. Sleep mode may occur suddenly or it may be gradual, beginning with a small reduction in the number of detectives assigned to the case. Think of it as the last stop before “cold case” status.
For the Aardsma investigation, the beginning of the end was around the time of another infamous crime in Pennsylvania: the murders of United Mine Workers of America union reformer Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, his wife, Margaret, and their daughter, Charlotte. Their violent deaths closed out the American murder year of 1969. In the wee hours of December 31, three weeks after Yablonski decisively lost his electoral challenge to the corrupt UMWA president, W. A. “Tony” Boyle, a trio of paid assassins crept toward the family’s fieldstone farmhouse near Clarksville in the southwest corner of the state, about 165 miles from Penn State University. They first cut the telephone lines to the house and disabled the family car parked in the driveway. Once inside, Paul Gilly, thirty-seven, a housepainter and gun collector, Claude Edward Vealey, twenty-seven, a professional burglar, and Aubran “Buddy” Martin, twenty-three, described as “a pretty, blond sociopath,” went upstairs and carried out their orders to murder Yablonski and anyone else who was in the house. Martin executed the sleeping Charlotte, twenty-five, with two shots to the head, then killed Jock, fifty-nine, and Margaret, fifty-seven, after Vealey’s M1 rifle misfired.1
The bodies were discovered five days later by Kenneth Yablonski, one of their sons. Both the Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI worked on the case, helped by physical evidence at the scene—a plethora of fingerprints—that the state police Aardsma investigators did not have because of the mishandling of the crime scene by the Penn State Campus Patrol and library administrators. Arrests in the Yablonski case came just three weeks later. Convictions and death sentences followed.
Tom Shelar, one of the Aardsma investigators, believed the Yablonski case diverted the attention of state police higher-ups. “Because a couple of guys said, ‘Well, there goes the pressure off of us.’ It all went onto the Yablonski thing because of the union connection and all that,” he remembered.2
For a couple of days, state police investigators thought the Yablonski and Aardsma cases might somehow be linked. Around January 9, 1970, a few days after the gruesome scene at the Yablonski house was discovered, Shelar learned of a twenty-eight-year-old Penn State student who was hospitalized in Ritenhour Health Center, the apparent victim of a mental breakdown. The student had been babbling, “They killed Aardsma, they killed Yablonski, I’m sorry, I’m sorr
y.” The student’s parents lived about thirty miles from the Yablonski home. Shelar asked the Yablonski investigators to do a background check on the student. After interviewing his parents, they concluded that he was mentally ill and unlikely to have real knowledge of either murder. It was one more frustration.3
The top commanders of the state police in Harrisburg were still concerned about solving the Aardsma case, enough so that one of them, a major whom Keibler would not identify, called a few months into 1970 with an extraordinary request. The major, who clearly had never been to Pattee Library, told Keibler, “We don’t want to be embarrassed. Take all those books out of the library to make sure the knife isn’t there.” Relating the story, Keibler chuckled. “Well, they had no idea what the Pattee Library was. He thought it was a room like this,” Keibler said, gesturing to the finished basement of his house. “And I explained to him that it would take five hundred men six months to do this. . . . He did not realize the magnitude.”4
That may have been the strangest call, but it was hardly the only one Keibler received from farther up the chain of command. “You had people from all over the state police, high command, picking the phone up and contacting me, saying, ‘Do this and do that,’ ” Keibler said. “Make sure we do this, follow that. And most of them did not have the knowledge of what was going on at Penn State, nor did they have the experience of a criminal investigator to know what the hell they were talking about.” Officers who had access to the main report would call him and announce that based on what they were reading, he needed to look closely at a certain person right away. “And I would say to this person, if you’re on page 27, if you’ll look at page 65, you’ll see that he’s been cleared.”5
Keibler was not particularly upset about the reduction in the staff assigned to the Aardsma investigation, from forty down to about twenty to twenty-five at the beginning of 1970. He believed he could have done a better job from the start with just ten veteran investigators. “When you have forty bodies here, you have a large number of them that are just bodies sent to you to help. They’re unfamiliar with how to deal with the campus. They’ve never been on campus, they don’t know a damn thing about it; you have that problem, okay? You have people coming in who have never been on the campus. So they have a hell of a time just getting around and knowing what to do. Fortunately, you’re able to take care of that by giving them assignments they can handle,” Keibler said.
The decision to downsize the Aardsma investigative staff was done, he said, “to get it down into a workable thing. Besides, I think the people at the top felt they’d covered their tail. They’d put a lot of people in there, there’s nothing that we need a lot of people for, we’ll get it down now to an investigative thing. And the people that I had, I could handle it with.” If one week he needed five more people, Keibler said, all he had to do was pick up the phone and he could get five more people.
But there was less and less work to do. They had rounded the bases several times without scoring a run. Albert Dunning, news director of WDFM Radio, said the daily briefings on the case trailed off to no briefings at all. Why hold a press conference if there was nothing new to report? District Attorney Charles Brown made the same observation. “I was getting fewer and fewer updates,” he said. “There was not much to report other than to say things are the way they were the last time we talked.” Keibler sent detectives out to Michigan again in the spring to take one more look at whether there was any connection between the Coed Murders and the Aardsma case. There wasn’t, or if there was, they couldn’t find it.6
By the time spring drew near, the Aardsma investigation was no further along than it had been in January. It was Lieutenant Kimmel’s idea, not Penn State’s, to offer a sizable reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Betsy’s killer. He approached Penn State president Eric Walker, asking where they could obtain funding for a reward. Walker, as Kimmel probably hoped, agreed to have the university put up the money. On March 9, 1970, a reward of $25,000 was offered, enough at that time to buy a house or start a small business—or to disappear. It was the equivalent of more than $150,000 today, enough to draw even the most reluctant tipster out of the shadows. A committee of five prominent Centre County residents led by attorney Wayland F. Dunaway of State College would decide who got the reward. State troopers and their families were not eligible. Other members of the committee were Mahlon K. Robb, president of the Bellefonte Trust Co., Jerome Weinstein, editor of the Centre Daily Times, J. Alvin Hawbaker, developer of Park Forest Village, the first large postwar housing development in the State College area, and Dr. J. Reed Babcock, a Bellefonte surgeon.
The reward and the involvement of important members of the community showed how seriously State College viewed the murder of Betsy Aardsma, a young woman who had been among them for barely three months, and the urgency they felt about finding her killer. It was basic human decency at work. But no one ever claimed the reward, and no one ever mentioned it when they did talk to investigators, according to Keibler. It finally expired on January 1, 1972, without stirring the conscience of the one man in the community who could have helped—or at least, not enough to make him pick up the telephone.7
In one of the last news releases by the state police during the active part of the Aardsma investigation, on March 9, 1970, Lieutenant Kimmel said they were looking for “a man and a woman known to be having a conversation in the area where Miss Aardsma’s body was found.” Was it Betsy and her killer? Or the killer asking one of her fellow English students where to find her? Or two people who just happened to be passing by? The tendency is to reach for straws, to assign importance to the smallest detail. Events would soon put a stop, at least temporarily, to even these last ditch efforts to solve the murder.
The descent of Penn State into chaos began on April 14, 1970, when about fifty student demonstrators occupied the Shields Building in support of demands made by black students at Penn State Ogontz, a branch campus outside of Philadelphia, for black student rights and black studies courses. The next day, about five hundred students rallied in front of Old Main at the main campus in support of their own latest list of demands to the administration. These included open admissions to Penn State, meaning no academic admission requirements that blocked black students struggling with the legacy of inferior inner city high schools; an end to Penn State ties to military research; an end to the ROTC program on campus; and support by Penn State for the freeing of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, who was then serving a four-year sentence for contempt of court handed down during the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial. (Seale was the eighth defendant, but his case was severed from that of the others after the contempt sentence.) He had no known ties to Penn State, but ending his incarceration was a cause célèbre among student protesters at the time. Between one hundred and three hundred of the students entered Old Main and began a sit-in while attempts were made to deliver their demands to President Walker. After windows were broken and other damage done, including vandalism of wall murals, university officials went to Centre County judge R. Paul Campbell and obtained a cease-and-desist order, which was read to the students at 4:00 p.m.8
Meanwhile, Keibler was ordered to put the Aardsma investigation on hold and bring his men in riot gear—helmets and wooden batons—from the Boucke Building to the front of Old Main. Keibler said Wells Keddie, the SDS faculty advisor who was with the student protesters in Old Main, persuaded state police commanders to order their men to remove their helmets and put away their batons. Why? They were a “provocation,” Keddie insisted. Who actually gave the order to disarm is in dispute. Keibler said it was Captain Earl O. Bergstrom, commander of Troop G. Trooper Mike Simmers, who was there undercover in plainclothes, trying to blend in among the students, says it was Major Robert A. Rice, a former marine, who until his promotion to major was the commander of Troop H, Harrisburg. Whoever gave the order, the results were disastrous. “They got the hell beat out of them,” Keibler said.9
The forty students inside Old Main surrendered, but other students outside attacked the disarmed and unhelmeted state police, hurling rocks, dirt balls, and pieces of wood. Some of the projectiles hit home, causing head injuries to at least ten troopers. An unidentified physician at Centre Community Hospital, where five of the injured troopers were taken, commented to the Centre Daily Times that if the troopers had been wearing their helmets, virtually none of them would have been injured. Five other troopers were admitted to Ritenhour Health Center and kept overnight.
Some of the students who came out of Old Main managed to escape, but twenty-nine others were herded onto buses and taken to Beaver Stadium, which was used as a holding pen. From there, they were transported to their arraignments and then to either Centre County Prison or, after the county lockup ran out of cells, to the Rockview state prison. The male students had their long hair—and beards, if they had them—shorn off at the prison. Keibler, wearing civilian clothes, drove a wrecker back to Old Main and managed to tow away a bus destroyed by the students. They didn’t realize who he really was.10
But the worst was yet to come. On April 18, some six thousand students jammed Rec Hall to hear an incendiary speech by radical lawyer William Kunstler, the lead attorney for the Chicago Seven defendants, and Rennie Davis, an antiwar activist who was one of the defendants. Kunstler and Davis had dinner before the speech at the Tavern in downtown State College with Jeffrey Berger, president of the Penn State SDS chapter. They told Berger they had to be careful during the speech to avoid inciting major demonstrations that could get them arrested once again for inciting to riot.11
