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

by David DeKok

  Terrie, despite her role in getting David and Betsy together, wasn’t sure that they would ever really click. Betsy was not a rah-rah girl and was indifferent to football, school spirit, or fraternities and sororities. “None of that really interested her,” Terrie said. “They really seemed to be like oil and water in some respects, [and] I just didn’t ever think they would match up.” She thinks David may have seemed too conventional to Betsy at first, but that she succeeded in loosening him up. “They seemed to be really, really enjoying each other’s company.” Olga Lozowchuk, however, didn’t think much of David or the relationship. He and Betsy seemed to be polar opposites, and not only in personality. He was from a big-city suburban, well-to-do family, and she was small-town and middle-class. “I didn’t know David very well. He did not give me the time of day,” Olga said. “I viewed him as a typical, vain frat boy, opportunistic and self-centered. Betsy was down-to-earth, no hidden agenda, wanted to do good things for others.” Her gut feeling was that David was “just using Betsy.” Andie thought Betsy was “head over heels” in love with David and was “very physical” with him. She acknowledged their very different personalities, “but that doesn’t matter, does it?”19

  What attracted Betsy to David? Perhaps he was finally the conventional man she wrote about longing to fall in love with in her letter to Peggy Wich, when she first came to Michigan in the fall of 1967. In that letter, she longed for someone she could love who also would be acceptable to her conservative parents. David almost certainly met that test. A future doctor was the stereotypical good catch. But would Betsy’s goals in life be compatible with his goal of becoming a physician? A wife of a physician in 1968 was expected by social convention to be a traditional helpmeet, taking care of the house and children and doing charity work while her doctor husband treated the sick and earned a good salary. Even as they became closer, Betsy hedged her bets and was never completely exclusive with David. That was her personal style. She wanted to experience everything life had to offer, and occasional friendly encounters with other men fell into that category.

  It is very possible that the author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was one of them. He came to Michigan as the second writer-in-residence of the winter term (following Jerzy Kozinski) in mid-January 1969, when the manuscript of his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, was at his publisher, but not due for publication until March. He was supposed to stay for two weeks, his cult following hanging on his every word. Betsy’s cousin, Chris Van Allsburg, remembers passing Vonnegut on the sidewalk outside East Quad [Vonnegut had a room in South Quad] a couple of times. He was a big fan of the author’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, but was too shy to walk up and talk to him. Betsy was not. Or perhaps Vonnegut approached her. She was well into her English and literature studies at Michigan by the start of the second semester in 1969, although she was taking only one English course in her final term, English 494, [George] Meredith to the Present, taught by Professor Bert Hornback. Two art history courses and a Psychology of Religion course rounded out her complement. Clearly, Betsy was a student who was in good standing with her English professors, because she had an opportunity to meet and talk with Vonnegut the day he arrived on campus, or shortly thereafter. And to charm him with her beauty, wit, and intelligence, as she did so many other men.20

  Vonnegut, according to his recent biographer, Charles J. Shields, was at that time looking for a way out of his twenty-year marriage to Jane Cox and bedding any number of younger women. During the fall of 1968, he had conducted affairs with Jane “Jimmy” Miller, the widow of a former student of his at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and then Suzanne McConnell, who had been one of his students at Iowa. Betsy invited Vonnegut and his English Department minder to a small party she and her apartment mates were having one Friday night in early January in their apartment at 441 South First Street. It may even have been a throw-away invitation by her, one she hoped he would accept while expecting that he probably wouldn’t.21

  The party began around 7:00 p.m. and was still going at nine-thirty when there was a knock at the door. Outside was a man with dark, bushy hair and a mustache. Betsy greeted him and ushered him inside. Olga Lozowchuk thought it was a little late to be arriving at a party, but the man explained that he had gone out to dinner with his minder, and that the professor didn’t want to come to the party because he had small children at home. He handed over a six-pack of Guinness Stout, which none of the roommates had ever seen, let alone drank. Betsy pointed to a sheet of paper hanging on the back of the door and asked him to sign his name and write something profound, as the other guests had done. He was reluctant at first, but finally wrote his name: Kurt Vonnegut. Of course, they all knew who he was, as nearly every literary-minded college student of the era did. Regrettably, Olga could remember no other details when recounting the story more than four decades later. It was like one of those memories poured from a vial into the pensive in the Harry Potter movies: brief, intense, incomplete. Betsy talked about Vonnegut to her friend Linda Marsa after she arrived at Penn State eight months later, but again, no details. We don’t know whether Vonnegut talked only to Betsy, how long he stayed, or whether he left alone.22

  Vonnegut, who was forty-six years old, spent only a week of his contractual two weeks at Michigan, deciding midway that he was sick of interacting with people. “I don’t particularly like to talk to people or listen to people,” he told an American Studies class one night. When a student inquired why he was there, Vonnegut responded, “We aren’t necessarily rational beings, you know.” He had also been scheduled to speak at Delta Community College in Bay City, Michigan, about a hundred miles north of Ann Arbor, where one of his lovers, Suzanne McConnell, was teaching that term. He called to cancel, then showed up at the school, scooped her into his car, and drove up the Lake Huron coast. They spent the night together at a motel and he left in the morning, heading back to his home on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The probability seems high that he had gone to Betsy’s party hoping to score with an attractive, interesting coed, but left frustrated. By that time, she was deeply involved with David L. Wright.23

  Chapter 17

  In the Shadow of a Killer

  He was among the more sadistic of serial killers, a leader in that benighted fraternity of cruelty. The Coed Killer who stalked and murdered young women around Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan from 1967 through 1969, but mostly in the latter year, did not merely take the lives of his six victims, as if that was not enough. He also raped them, tortured them, bashed in their faces, and finished them off with knives, ligatures, blunt instruments, or, one time only, gunshots. Even then he was not always finished. In at least one instance, he peeled off large sections of his victim’s skin, postmortem. Unlike Buffalo Bill, the fictional serial killer in Thomas Harris’s 1988 crime novel, The Silence of the Lambs, the Coed Killer is not known to have made clothing from the skin. Nor were his victims chubby, as in the book. On the contrary, they were all petite. Betsy Aardsma was slim but much taller than the girls he murdered, eight inches taller in one instance. But like her, they were all pretty brunettes, which the news stories often mentioned, and which alarmed her family.

  The Coed Killer may have ended forever the insouciance about personal safety characteristic of so many young women of that era, whether they were students at one of the two universities or townies. They did not fully understand that there were some men, even in a university town, who would kill them for sport or to satisfy sexual demons. They did not completely end their casual hitchhiking, the accepting of rides home from total strangers, or their trust in the basic goodness of fellow humans. But they came to realize that a monster could be out there waiting to snare them, and things were never the same afterward.

  From Betsy’s comments to one of her apartment mates, probably Andie, it seems that she, too, worried about the Coed Killer. According to comments Reverend Van Oostenburg made at her funeral, she said that spring that if she was murdered,
she wanted a resurrection-themed sermon at her funeral. Her roommates and friends, interviewed more than forty years later, do not seem to have been overly fearful themselves, but fear tends to diminish over time. In Betsy’s case, the gut-wrenching fear induced in her family by the Coed Killer would have a profound effect.

  The Coed Killer started slowly. His first victim was Mary Fleszar, an Eastern Michigan University student, nineteen years old, who left her stiflingly hot apartment in Ypsilanti on the evening of July 8, 1967, to go for a walk and never returned. Her parents in Willis, a small farm town southeast of Ypsilanti, waited eleven days to report her disappearance to the police, hoping against hope that their daughter would appear at their door. They, too, were in denial about the changing nature of American society. Mary’s badly decomposed body was not found for a month. Two fifteen-year-old boys plowing a field north of Ann Arbor on August 7 spotted her naked corpse facedown in front of their tractor. Mary’s feet, one hand, and the fingers of the other hand had been chopped off to make identification difficult, but her dental records were enough. The medical examiner ruled that she had died of multiple stab wounds to the chest. The location where Mary’s body was found was described by police as adjoining a lovers’ lane. That would be true of many of his future victims, as well. The Coed Killer, who knew no love and hated women, possessed a sick sense of irony.1

  He waited almost a year, until June 30, 1968, to commit his second murder. She was another EMU coed, Joan Schell, who wanted to teach art to young children and had a boyfriend who was an army deserter. She was twenty years old and decidedly petite, at five feet and ninety pounds. That night she wore a blue miniskirt. Her roommate pleaded with her not to hitchhike to Ann Arbor. She followed Joan out of the EMU Student Union to the street, imploring her not to be stupid, but saw her get into a car with three young men. As the car sped off, she saw it turn the wrong way if they were going to Ann Arbor. Five days later, construction workers followed a strange odor to Joan’s body in a forest along a road on the northeast side of Ann Arbor. She had been stabbed twenty-five times in a bloodlust frenzy. In addition, she had been raped, and her blue miniskirt was wrapped around her neck. Police immediately saw the similarities between the murder of Mary Fleszar a year earlier and this new murder, but that was as far as things went. Both murders had been written up in the press, but they had occurred in midsummer, when most students were home, and so passed them by. Betsy and her friends barely took notice.2

  His true reign of terror began in March of 1969, during Betsy’s final semester at the University of Michigan. For years afterward, everyone thought the Coed Killer’s next victim was Jane Mixer, a twenty-three-year-old student at the University of Michigan Law School, who had twice been the women’s debate champion at Michigan. She had posted a note on the ride board at the Law School looking for a lift to Muskegon, where her parents lived. She received a call from a young man who gave his name as “David Johnson” and is believed to have left with him that night. The next morning, her body was found in the Denton Cemetery, located about fifteen miles east of the Law School off of Interstate 94, near Belleville Lake. She had been shot twice in the head with a .22 caliber pistol and strangled with a nylon stocking, but had not been raped. A copy of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch 22, very popular at the time, lay at her side. Long attributed to the Coed Killer, the crime was solved in 2004 when a DNA test implicated Gary Leiterman, who lived in Washington State but had worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative in the Ann Arbor area in 1969. He was tried and convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, although doubt remains about the DNA evidence. At the time, though, Mixer’s murder was believed to be the latest work of the Coed Killer.3

  Perhaps the well-publicized murder of Jane Mixer stirred his competitive instincts. The next day, he went out looking for a victim of his own, and he found her in Maralynn Skelton, a troubled, drug-using, sixteen-year-old hippie chick and recent high school dropout from Romulus, Michigan. Her parents had recently moved to Flint in the hope of getting her away from the drug culture of Ann Arbor and Detroit. On March 22, her brother drove her from Flint to Ann Arbor to meet her fiancé but couldn’t take her all the way to his house. Hitchhiking the rest of the way, she was apparently picked up by the Coed Killer and murdered. Her body was found three days later in a forest near Michigan’s North Campus, not far from where Joan Schell’s body had been found in the summer of 1968.

  Maralynn was lying naked on her back, her legs spread and a stick jammed into her vagina. She had been whipped with a belt with a large metal buckle. Her face, particularly her right eye, was a mess, and a garter belt was tied around her neck. Ann Arbor police chief Walter Krasny described her condition as one of the worst things he had seen in thirty years of police work. It didn’t take Krasny long to connect the dots between Skelton’s murder and the murders of Fleszar and Schell, but even then he was uncertain about Mixer, who had been shot and not raped. Sheriff Doug Harvey of Washtenaw County, which surrounds Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, summed up what everyone was thinking: “There’s somebody mentally deranged around here who has to be caught quickly—I mean, fast.” Her parents buried Maralynn in a pale yellow dress in a light green casket covered with red rosebuds.4

  And then came Dawn Basom, just thirteen years old and an eighth grader at West Junior High School in Ypsilanti. Inevitably, she was short, just over five-foot-two, pretty, and a brunette, but, unlike the others, quite strong. She lifted weights, unusual for a girl at that time, and could bench-press seventy pounds, more than her brother could. For a girl who weighed 120 pounds, that was saying something, then or now. Her mother was a widow, and Dawn seems to have had a great deal of freedom to go where she wanted. On the evening of April 15, 1969, she announced that she was bored and was going out to see friends. In fact, she was going to the Depot Town section of Ypsilanti to see her boyfriend, who was five years older than her. Dawn spent some time with him, then began walking back home, a distance of nearly two miles.5

  Along the way, she encountered the Coed Killer and went off with him, possibly on his motorcycle. He took her to an abandoned farmhouse north of Ypsilanti, dragged her to the dark, dank basement, and strangled her with a piece of wire he found at the old farm. Police speculated that he must have had an accomplice, given her strength and feistiness. The question of accomplices was never answered, on this murder or any of the others, despite the clues. Her body was found along a country road not far from her home, yet another “lovers’ lane.” She was semi-naked, no jeans, no panties, and probably had been raped, although the lab test was inconclusive. Her legs were spread wide and locked in rigor mortis. Dawn’s blouse had been ripped to pieces, and part of it was stuffed in her mouth. The wire was still around her neck. There were slash marks on her breasts, but, for whatever reason, he had not mutilated her to the extent he did the others. Nor had he plunged a knife into her chest or beaten her in the face. A small favor? Or perhaps Dawn did fight back and he had to kill her quickly rather than entertain himself with her slow, excruciatingly painful death.6

  On the other side of Michigan, the headline in the Benton Harbor News-Palladium read slayings terrorize 2 university towns. Similar headlines were composed in newsrooms around the state, in the Upper and Lower Peninsulas. The story about Dawn Basom in the Holland Evening Sentinel, almost certainly read by the Aardsma family, was police comb area of fifth murder. The Sentinel covered all the Coed Killer’s depredations after he resumed his work in March. What would any parent think if they had a pretty, brown-haired daughter at one of those schools?

  Betsy’s life was complicated that spring. She fretted over a visit to Ann Arbor by David’s parents and worried about what to wear when the four of them went to dinner. Although Olga Lozowchuk suspected that David wasn’t really interested in Betsy, the relationship seemed to grow deeper. That was a pleasant surprise to Terrie Andrews, one of the other apartment mates. Complications also had arisen from Betsy’s home in Holland. No one
from Betsy’s own family came to visit her that year, possibly an indication of continuing problems regarding her father. “I believe she told me that her father had a drinking problem and that the home environment was not very healthy,” said Olga, who had the impression that Betsy couldn’t wait to put Holland behind her. She doesn’t remember Betsy ever going home for the weekend, either, unless it was a holiday. Nor did her parents come for graduation, and Olga ended up using Betsy’s tickets for her own family.

  Jan Sasamoto put a different spin on that omission, saying that Betsy didn’t want to attend the ceremony, so why should her parents come? “She just sort of blew it off,” Jan said. “She just wasn’t interested in participating.” Graduation at the University of Michigan indeed was an impersonal cattle call, with thousands of graduates and their families jammed into the huge football stadium. When your class was called, you stood up, Sasamoto recalled. She got to stand up twice, once for her regular class, and a second time with her fellow physical therapy graduates. No one marched across the stage and shook hands with the president as their parents beamed and took pictures. There were simply too many graduates for that to be practical.7

  What Betsy would do after graduation remained undecided. She had long wanted to join the Peace Corps and do a tour in Africa, talking about it as early as her freshman year at Hope College. Terrie Andrews remembered her wanting to give something back to the world and being particularly concerned about underdeveloped countries and people in them who were struggling to survive. The University of Michigan had a special and historic connection with the Peace Corps, ever since October 14,1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy, fresh off one of his presidential debates with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, had stood outside the Michigan Union at 2:00 a.m. (he had just arrived; a crowd of students had been waiting since 10:00 p.m.) and announced his idea for a program that would send idealistic young Americans to underdeveloped countries to help educate and uplift their people. Today, a plaque on the building near the spot where he stood notes that Kennedy was cheered by a large crowd of students, “for the hope and promise [his remarks] gave the world.” After he was elected, JFK created the Peace Corps by Executive Order on March 1, 1961.8