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

by David DeKok

  From the start, Betsy Aardsma was a top student, always one of the smart girls, seemingly destined for great things. She attended Longfellow Elementary School from kindergarten through fourth grade, from 1952 to 1957, and left her friends with lifelong memories of her artistic drive and love of drawing. Sandy Vande Water, a classmate, remembered her bursting into tears one day when she didn’t have time to finish an art project. “Typical artistic, emotional little girl at that time of her life,” she remembered more than fifty years later. “Kind of a delicate—what we would think of as an artistic—personality. That’s what I remember about her. And she followed that love of drawing and writing and anything in the creative arts.” Margo Hakken, who was a fellow Blue Bird, remembered Betsy as “very brilliant, real artistic, a lot of fun, and really creative.” Even at the end of her life, Sergeant George Keibler of the Pennsylvania State Police marveled at the “doodles” she left behind in her room in Atherton Hall.7

  With four children, Dick and Esther Aardsma needed more space, and they moved in the late summer of 1957 to the 100 block of East 37th Street. This was a neighborhood that had not yet been annexed to Holland. Betsy spent three years at Maplewood Elementary, which went to seventh grade, before moving on to E. E. Fell Junior High School in Holland for eighth and ninth grades. Fell, located along River Avenue between 16th and 15th Streets, was a three-story brick edifice of the kind one would have found then in a thousand American small towns. It had up-staircases and down-staircases, and only the bravest students dared to use the wrong one and risk a detention.8

  On that first day of eighth grade in 1960, Betsy met and befriended another new student, Jan Sasamoto, a Japanese-American girl and only child whose background was as different from her own as she was likely to find in Holland. Ted and Toshi Sasamoto, Jan’s parents, had arrived in Holland around 1944. Originally from Los Angeles, Mr. Sasamoto had traveled around the country working for poultry growers as a chicken sexer. He could tell at a glance whether a hatchling was male or female (most male chicks were euthanized because they couldn’t produce eggs). When World War II broke out, his father was interned at a camp in Colorado because he served on the board of a Japanese school, which offered after-school instruction in Japanese language and culture. So was Toshi Sasamoto’s sister, who had married a man in an internment camp. Internment, which was driven by fear of a Japanese fifth column in the American homeland, but also by racism and economic envy, was not uniformly imposed on all Japanese Americans. Indeed, the experience of the Sasamoto family made it seem almost arbitrary. With travel to distant jobs becoming increasingly difficult, Ted and Toshi decided to move to Holland, where they had friends and there were plenty of chicken farms. They married and bought a house on Harvard Drive in Holland Heights, near the Holland Country Club.9

  Eighth-grade homeroom for Betsy and Jan turned out to be the school library, and they met because they happened to sit at the same table. The homeroom teacher asked them to elect officers. Betsy leaned over to Jan and whispered, “What do you want to be? I’ll nominate you if you nominate me.”

  “That’s how it started,” Jan said. Their friendship deepened over time, she said, explaining how in French there is one word, camarade, for “classmate,” and another, ami, for “close friend.” She and Betsy started as the first and gradually moved to the second. They didn’t have that many classes together in junior high and didn’t often eat lunch together that first year, Jan recalled. But little things pulled them together, like sneaking down the hallway without a pass. “Betsy would say to me, ‘Just look like you know you have a hall pass, because we’ve got a good reputation.’ And they never did question us!” she said.10

  If likes attract, it was not surprising that Jan became Betsy’s best friend. They were among the top students at E. E. Fell. In the spring of ninth grade, both were honored, along with seven other students in her class, for having maintained perfect 4.0 grade point averages during junior high. The two girls couldn’t wait to get to high school, crashing the senior high dances “well before we were eligible,” Jan recalled.11

  The rarity of murder in Holland could understandably lull anyone there into thinking the world was a safe place, especially if you associated with the right kind of people and didn’t stray far from home. Even Holland’s most terrible murder, which occurred on April 29, 1961, wasn’t enough to shake that complacency. On that date, James Scott Stephens, a seventeen-year-old boy who was mentally ill and liked guns, shot to death two innocent young girls, Margaret S. Chambers, eleven, and Carol Gee, twelve, while they were picking flowers in the dunes along Lake Michigan near Macatawa Park. Stephens, a student at Saugatuck High School who lived in the same neighborhood as the girls, claimed it was accidental, the result of having tripped, but could never explain how he shot them eleven times by accident. He fled on his thumb, hitchhiking to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and then west across the UP, across Wisconsin and Minnesota to South Dakota. He was finally spotted by a local police chief and arrested in a cafe in Kadoka, a lonely prairie town near the Badlands. Stephens was convicted and sentenced to a long prison term—Michigan never had the death penalty—and committed suicide in his cell a few years later. The murders shocked the Holland community, which reached out to the girls’ families. The Gees, who were Catholic, were established in Holland, while the Chambers family, Baptists, had roots in the South. Margaret and Carol were buried in Pilgrim Home Cemetery.

  And the city moved on. It was still possible, if you lived in Holland, to pass off this tragedy as an aberration, something that involved outsiders, and believe your world was still a pretty safe place. At least if you stayed close to home.12

  In the fall of 1962, Betsy Aardsma and Jan Sasamoto moved to the new Holland High School. Built along Van Raalte Avenue, it was laid out more like a college campus, with two main classroom buildings, a domed fieldhouse, a separate performing arts center, a library and administration building, a visual arts building, and a building for wood and metal shop and mechanical drawing. Holland High was a far cry from most American high schools of that day, or any day. The differences extended to attendance policy. If you didn’t have a class during a particular period, you could leave campus and do what you pleased, so long as you didn’t get into trouble and showed up for your next class. There was no sign-out or sign-in required. In practice, most students went to one of the four Commons areas in the two classroom units and spent their free periods working on homework or talking to friends and solving the problems of the world. No teacher directly monitored the room, although students were expected to hold down the volume of their conversations. There was no cafeteria, just coin-operated hot- and cold-food machines. Such a progressive attendance policy might only have worked in a conservative, relatively homogeneous, churchgoing community like Holland, but it did work for many years. Holland Christian High School, run by the Christian Reformed Church, maintained strict, traditional discipline and rules.

  Betsy hung out in the Commons with a group of other girls bound for college, including Jan Sasamoto; Judi Jahns, whose father was a GE transplant; Peggy Wich, whose family had moved to Holland from Detroit so her banker father could start a new finance company; Leslie Nienhuis; Sandy Vande Water; Margo Hakken; and a few others. “It was one of those clique things,” Sasamoto said. “We had friends outside it, but we were pretty tight.” She said they weren’t the popular girls, as that term is understood in most high schools, but were officers in every club, notably the Publicity Club, or “Pub Club.” “I don’t think we were the cutest,” Wich added, then reconsidered her opinion. “Well, we were pretty cute. But [we were] the [girls] who wanted good grades and were going to college.” Another common thread among about half of Betsy’s friends was that they were not Holland natives.13

  They were all Dutch Dancers, part of a unique Holland tradition. At Tulip Time, dozens of girls from the three Holland-area high schools would put on traditional Dutch peasant costumes and wooden shoes,
somewhat like clogs, and perform folk dances. Also known as Klompen dancers, after the Dutch word for “wooden shoes,” they had been a highlight of Tulip Time since 1935. Girls paired off, one dancing the female role and the other the male; recruiting boys was deemed a lost cause. Betsy and Jan were a Dutch Dance pair, with the male role danced by Betsy, who was several inches taller than her friend. The costumes either were sewn by a girl or her mother from approved patterns or acquired at an annual community Dutch costume exchange. Wooden shoes were manufactured by the Wooden Shoe Factory in Holland, one of the city’s thematic tourist attractions for many decades. They were not uncomfortable if you wore enough layers of socks. Sometimes a dancer would lose a wooden shoe on a high kick and watch in horror as it sailed into the mob of parade spectators along 8th Street. The Tulip Festival celebrated a Netherlands that no longer was. The traditional costumes had vanished from Old Holland, save perhaps in the most remote island villages, and wooden shoes, while still practical for Dutch farmers working in damp ground, had pretty much become historical relics as well.14

  Even though the Netherlands of Tulip Time no longer existed, Holland was recognized by the Dutch government and royal family as a special place. Crown Princess Juliana visited Holland in 1941, while she and her children were in exile in Canada because of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. She became queen in 1948 after the abdication of her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, and returned to Holland for another visit as queen in 1952. Other members of the royal family visited in later years. Kids who grew up in Holland got used to this, as different as it might seem to outsiders. But blond/bland, that overwhelming sense of tidiness, and the sense of being part of a theme-park attraction could become old. Some Holland kids yearned for any splash of color they could find, longing to escape the confining walls of the citadel that was Holland.15

  None of Betsy’s friends remember her as boy-crazy. They say she dated from time to time but was more interested in her studies. According to Jan Sasamoto, she was “no prude,” but not promiscuous either when it came to physical relationships. “Lots of girls in high school are after the guys, and she wasn’t that type of person,” said Vicki Sparks, “although she [did have] many male friends.” Jan thought that Luke Kliphuis, who had a mild “bad boy” reputation among the girls at Holland High, was the closest Betsy came to a serious boyfriend. “We used to have lunch together and stuff like that,” Kliphuis said. “And there was a little slap and tickle going on, but it wasn’t anything, really. We were good friends for a long time.” Much of that was communal activity, the usual group of girls plus a few guy friends like Kliphuis who would join the table during their free periods. “To me, [Betsy] was good-looking, but she wasn’t one of those people who augmented herself,” Kliphuis said. “She didn’t wear a lot of makeup, or any. She was just kind of a normal kid.” He didn’t find her intelligence intimidating. They had a biology class together. “She wasn’t somebody who stood out in a class. She was one of those quiet people who took good notes and got all the stuff right,” he said.16

  That was perhaps the greatest difference between them. Kliphuis worked the evening shift at the Hitching Post restaurant kitchen, or at the Warm Friend Hotel as a bellhop, or at a service station pumping gas, back at a time when most stations hired men or boys to do that. His studies suffered. Working jobs during the school year and not doing well in school set him apart from Betsy and the other members of her group. “Those kids got allowances and had a lot of support,” Kliphuis said. “All those girls had parents who guarded them pretty closely. . . . They were really focused on getting ahead in life.” When she was fifteen, toward the end of 1962, Luke took Betsy to the Horizon formal dance at the Holland Civic Center, picking her up (he was sixteen and had his license) in his father’s white Lincoln. He remembers meeting Dick Aardsma, who he recalled as nice, but “pretty intense,” and really into “success through focus and stuff.” Afterward, Kliphuis remembered, they went back to the Sasamoto house with Jan and her date, Allen Holleman. Whatever they had didn’t last. Kliphuis may have been the unnamed subject of the poem read at Betsy’s funeral about the boyfriend whose values were too worldly.17

  By the time the next Horizon formal rolled around in June, her date was Tom Bolhuis, who says they met at a high school dance and became acquaintances, then friends. Anything more than that was precluded by the disconcerting discovery that they were second or third cousins by her maternal grandmother, Bessie Bolhuis Van Alsburg. Betsy hosted a prom pre-party at her house for twenty-one of her friends and their dates. Her mother was always putting little news snippets about family doings into the Holland Evening Sentinel, so it is easy to determine who was there.18

  The friendship between Betsy and Jan deepened in high school. They mostly hung out at Betsy’s house, but when they went in a group, going to a home or away basketball or football game, it was Jan’s father who drove. Betsy didn’t particularly like sports, Jan said, but went along for the socializing. Gradually, she and Jan became fast friends, despite their different personalities. “She was the artist,” Sasamoto said. “She put the color in my world, and I think I put a little structure in hers.” They were comfortable enough with each other that neither got jealous if the other spent time with different friends.

  Several of Betsy’s friends, including Jan, described her as artistic and “quirky,” which they meant in a nice way, but in a way that set her apart from the Holland norm. “A little bit of a different stride,” Jan said of Betsy. “In a lovely way. Not weird, not strange, a very light spirit.” On St. Patrick’s Day during their senior year, in 1965, Betsy came to school with her hair dyed green, she recalled. One of her male friends, Brad Spahr, who went to the Naval Academy after graduation, took one look at her hair and uttered an exaggerated, “Why?” Not everybody “got” her humor, Jan conceded, and this could hurt her in popularity contests, such as getting elected to the Athletic Sisters—a group of girls who wore red blazers and sold candy and Cracker Jack at the boys games—and Student Council, although she eventually was elected to the latter. “They didn’t dislike her,” Sasamoto said. “She just was a little different.”19

  Indeed, Jan believed that many Holland High boys found Betsy too different to be prime girlfriend material. “Betsy was different in a time when different wasn’t celebrated. So a lot of guys thought she was funny and cute and smart and all that, but that wasn’t the kind of girl they were looking for at that time. I don’t think they valued that,” she said. “The kind of guys she attracted were a little intimidated by her in some respects, because she was kooky and smart and artistic. And so she never had a problem finding someone to dance with at dances or go out with to the big dances.”20

  Peggy Wich defined different in Betsy’s case as being artistic and saying what was on her mind. “She was authentic and had her own ideas about stuff. Interesting observations that other people didn’t make,” Wich said. In their senior year, she and Betsy went to visit her brother, Hank Wich, at St. Joseph’s College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Rensselaer, Indiana. The Chicago Bears held their summer training camp at St. Joseph’s, and the tearjerker 1971 film about the team, Brian’s Song, was filmed on campus. Peggy was an observant Catholic and made a point, when out with Betsy, to not eat meat on Fridays, then a strict rule in the Catholic Church. “And I forgot [once] and ate a hot dog, and she said it was the high point of her life, to watch me eat a hot dog on [a] Friday,” Wich said. Betsy was a notoriously bad driver, getting her license late and never having any great desire to operate a motor vehicle. “Let’s put it this way,” Sasamoto said. “I would always volunteer to drive. She would go, ‘Why is that person honking?’ And I would say, ‘Maybe because you pulled out in front of him?’ ”21

  But people also remembered Betsy for the best of human qualities. Jo Ann Pelon, who lived a couple doors down from Betsy on East 37th Street and was six years younger, remembered her neighbor as “smart, kind, and beautiful.” Wich said her fr
iend “was just so easy. She was a really easy person and just liked everybody. She was just easy for people to be with, and not very judgmental at all.” Margo Hakken recalled that Betsy “never had any enemies, because she never said a cross word about anybody.” And Sasamoto couldn’t remember ever bickering or fighting with Betsy. “It was just that kind of friendship; it was give and take,” she said. “We were just easy with each other.” Another girl remembered her “sunny personality.” For her old friends, the memories flowed like water.22

  During her junior and senior years, she began dating Jeff Lubbers, whose father, Dr. Julius Lubbers, was a dentist who had successfully pushed for the fluoridation of Holland’s drinking water. Dr. Lubbers had also graduated from Hope College, and in the same class, 1940, as Dick and Esther Aardsma. Betsy and Jeff would walk on the Lake Michigan beach near his parents’ cottage just south of Camp Geneva, near the end of Riley Street. Late at night, the two of them, plus Jan and other friends, would hang out at the Howard Johnson’s on South Washington Avenue, downing coffees and Cokes. Betsy was the kind of girl you wanted to marry, Lubbers said, the cute girl next door. He remembered her baggy sweaters, French beret, and “artistic” aura. “She was friendly, easygoing—just a great person,” Lubbers said. Nevertheless, he did not consider her his girlfriend.23

  There was never any doubt in Betsy’s mind or anyone else’s that she would go to college. But for what? She was torn between her love of English and art and her desire to work in medicine. Peggy Wich remembers her as a voracious reader, more interested in books than the Beatles or the other rock-and-roll music on the radio. Her tenth-grade English teacher was John Noe, a Marine Corps veteran of World War II who bore literal scars of battle on his face. From Noe’s personal records, we know that Betsy received a C on a punctuation test and a B+ on a book report but finished the course with a straight A. She moved on to honors English in eleventh grade and achieved As there, too.24