by David DeKok
Peace Corps recruiters were at the University of Michigan from February 3–7, 1969, setting up shop in Room 3529 of the Student Activities Building. This presumably is when Betsy Aardsma took the tests and filled out her application. She told them she wanted to go to Africa.
However, she did not hear back immediately from the Peace Corps, and in the meantime considered a fallback option: graduate school in English. Betsy had done well at Michigan. She would receive her degree “with distinction,” which at Michigan meant she was in the top 25 percent of her class, and “with honors” in English, the lowest of three honors levels, but very good nonetheless. It generally signified a grade point average of at least 3.4 on a 4.0 scale and having demonstrated capacity for independent work. She should not have had much of a problem getting into what was one of America’s better graduate programs in English. Joann Manz, whose boyfriend and future husband, Nicholas Lekas, was a close friend of David L. Wright’s, had even talked to her about sharing an apartment in Ann Arbor during her first year of graduate school at Michigan.9
But her family was adamantly opposed to her staying in Ann Arbor. Her father and mother, Dick and Esther Aardsma, now apparently reconciled, and her uncle and aunt, Louis and Ruth Cotts, were alarmed by the thought of her staying and enrolling in graduate classes at Michigan when there was a serial killer still preying on pretty, brown-haired young women. Her beloved uncle, in particular, urged her to get out of Ann Arbor.10
And then two letters arrived, one for her and one for David, and they changed everything. Her own letter was her acceptance into the Peace Corps. Olga Lozowchuk remembered the day Betsy’s letter arrived. It contained a penny, proffered as “A penny for your thoughts,” and offered her an assignment believed now to have been in the West African country of Sierra Leone, a former British colony where in 1969 there were about 260 Peace Corps volunteers, primarily engaged in teaching. Betsy was excited but realized she was at a crossroads in her life. David’s letter was his acceptance to the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania, which had opened in the fall of 1967. They could not pursue their own dreams and stay together—at least, not easily.
Betsy broke the news to David one night after the letter arrived. He had pulled into a parking space behind the apartment building where they both lived, and she told him she had been accepted into the Peace Corps and would be leaving in the summer for three months of stateside training, followed by two years in Africa. She hoped he would wait for her. She wanted him to wait. David, though, was noncommittal, telling her that she might meet a new love in the Peace Corps, and he might meet someone in Pennsylvania. “I sort of selfishly said, ‘I don’t know what will happen,’ ” Wright said. “I guess that’s probably the truth.” It was not the answer she wanted. She loved David and was devastated, uncertain what to do. Going to Africa was her dream, even more so than becoming a physician had once been.11
Later in the spring, probably in late May or early June, Betsy called up Jeff Lubbers, her old prom date, and asked if she could come out and see him at his parents’ cottage along Lake Michigan, north of Holland. They went for a long walk on the beach. Jeff had also wanted to join the Peace Corps, but his dentist father was strongly opposed and his friends were unsupportive. So he didn’t even apply. As the waves rolled over their bare feet, dampening the first few feet of sand, Betsy talked about the pros and cons of going to Africa, the dangers, everything. She felt that her choices, because of her family’s opposition to her staying in Ann Arbor, were to go to Africa or follow David to Pennsylvania. If she went to Africa, she would probably lose David. And if she went to Pennsylvania, then what? She knew no one there and knew little about Penn State University. The medical school was a hundred miles from the main campus, so they would still be apart even if she could still get into the graduate English program at this late date. Betsy made no decision that day.
Jan Sasamoto, who was getting married in Holland on August 25, was pressing her for a decision on whether she would be one of her bridesmaids; if she went into the Peace Corps, she would be gone by late August. Around the beginning of June, with Betsy still undecided, Jan picked a sorority sister to take her place in the bridal party.12
The body of another pretty brunette, twenty-one-year-old Alice Kalom, was discovered in a field seven miles north of Ann Arbor, near North Territorial Road and US Highway 23. She had been raped, shot twice in the head with a .22 pistol, her throat cut so deeply that her head was nearly off, and stabbed ferociously in the chest—a classic, Coed Killer sex-and-bloodlust frenzy. Alice was from Portage, Michigan, about sixty miles southeast of Holland. She was a senior at Michigan and should have graduated on May 3, when Betsy did, but still needed to complete a photography project to receive her art degree. Alice Kalom and Jim Schoolmaster, David L. Wright’s roommate, had both graduated from Portage Northern High School and were acquaintances. Alice was last seen at 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 8, leaving a private dance party at the Depot House at 416 South Ashley Street, Ann Arbor, with an unidentified male companion. A former railroad station then used as a band rehearsal space, the Depot House was just beyond the railroad tracks that ran behind the parking lot of Betsy’s apartment building at 441 South First Street, an almost-literal stone’s throw away. You could see their old apartment from the Depot House. Even though Betsy had moved home by then, it placed the Coed Killer well into the fear zone of her world.13
Betsy was hoping that David would ask her to follow him to Pennsylvania, Jan Sasamoto said. She did not want him to be able to say “Well, I never asked you to follow me,” if things ended badly. This was a big deal for her. The social conventions of the time prevented Betsy from simply asking David whether he wanted her to come to Penn State with him. He had to pop the question. Jan believes he finally did. Indeed, according to what David told Kevin Cirilli in 2009, he told Betsy that he didn’t want her to leave, but that it was her decision. She chose him. Betsy gave up her dream, informing the Peace Corps that she would not be accepting the assignment to Sierra Leone. She applied soon after for the English graduate program at Penn State and was accepted. Michigan was known as a far superior program, so logically, her decision didn’t make any sense, but logic had little to do with it. Fear of the Coed Killer was certainly one factor; her family was relieved that she was leaving Ann Arbor for Pennsylvania. And then, of course, there was love.14
She and Jan spent a lot of time together during that last summer. And what a summer it was! Holland, or rather, nearby Saugatuck, had its first serious rock festival during the July Fourth weekend, featuring mostly Michigan bands, including the MC-5, Bob Seger, the Amboy Dukes (Ted Nugent in his pre-NRA days), and the Stooges, but also one British headliner, Procol Harum, and three famous blues singers, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Big Mama Thornton. It didn’t hold a candle to the now-famous Woodstock Music and Art Fair that took place near Bethel, New York, a few weeks later, but what did? Above their heads that summer, well above, was the first Moon landing on July 20,1969. All of America and much of the world watched the ghostly, black-and-white video images of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin loping across the Moon’s dusty surface. It was the high-water mark of the American century.
But it was also the long, hot summer of the murder year. The Coed Killer had been briefly quiescent, but in northern California, the Zodiac Killer—so named because he supposedly consulted his horoscope to determine when to attack—was targeting teenage couples parked on lonely “lovers’ lanes” around Vallejo, thirty-five miles northeast of downtown San Francisco. Zodiac reveled in the public terror he created. Unlike the Coed Killer, he taunted the public and especially the police, daring them to catch him. Letters received on August 1, 1969, by the Vallejo and San Francisco newspapers contained part of a 408-symbol cryptogram that Zodiac claimed would reveal his identity. He demanded that it be published on the front pages of the papers, and it was. Two readers decrypted it, but it was just another taunting m
essage. Zodiac continued murdering young people through the fall of 1969 and was never apprehended. The author Robert Graysmith believes he knows who Zodiac is, but no arrest was ever made. Authors can draw strong conclusions about guilt from available evidence and logic, but law enforcement needs proof that will stand up in court.15
On August 9, 1969, members of the Manson Family, a hippie cult devoted to Charles Manson, a thirty-five-year-old guru and ex-con, went to a house in Los Angeles and slaughtered five people: actress Sharon Tate, who was married to director Roman Polanski; Jay Sebring, a noted celebrity hair stylist and Tate’s former lover; Wojciech Frykowski, a friend of Polanski’s from Poland who was an aspiring screenwriter; Abigail Folger, Frykowski’s lover and heir to the Folger’s coffee fortune; and Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Polanski was in London.) On the following night, Manson Family killers traveled to the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, and killed both of them.
If there were any doubts in the minds of Betsy’s family members that she was doing the right thing in leaving Ann Arbor to accompany David to Pennsylvania, they were probably erased by the murder of Karen Sue Beineman on July 23, 1969. Beineman, a tiny, blue-eyed brunette from Grand Rapids, was just five-foot-two and weighed one hundred pounds. She was eighteen years old and had just started the summer term as a first-year student at Eastern. Karen was last seen in her dorm around noon that day and reported missing at eleven that night. She was observed accepting a motorcycle ride from a young man outside the shop where she had just bought a wig. “I’ve only done two foolish things,” she told the wig-store manager as she was leaving. “Buy this wig, and accept a ride from a stranger on a motorcycle.”
Her body was discovered three days later about midway between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, not far from Concordia University, a Lutheran college. Similar to the other murders by the Coed Killer, she had been raped and strangled, her face beaten beyond recognition. She was naked except for sandals, and appeared to have been rolled down an embankment. Police needed to use fingerprints taken from her dorm room to identify her. A pathologist said large patches of her skin were stripped from her body. Michigan students still in Ann Arbor for the summer marched in protest on July 29 to denounce Washtenaw County sheriff Doug Harvey’s failure to find the Coed Killer. 16
And two days after that, police arrested John Norman Collins, twenty-two, a classically handsome and athletic former Eastern Michigan University English major who had wanted to be an elementary school teacher. He considered himself to be a superman of the Nietzschean variety, exempt from the petty laws that constrained lesser men. When the police searched his Olds Cutlass, they found the Cliff Notes to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in the glove compartment. They charged him with the murder of Karen Sue Beineman.17
Born in Canada, Collins had grown up in Center Line, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Most recently, he had stayed in a rooming house three blocks from the EMU campus and across the street from where one of the earlier victims, Joan Schell, had resided. Mary Fleszar had lived two blocks away. He was the nephew of Michigan State Police corporal David Leik, who thought highly of his nephew and had urged him to consider joining the state police. Collins often hung out with cops—including those on the task force searching for the Coed Killer—in the Bomber Restaurant in Ypsilanti. He went motorcycle riding with an officer from the Eastern Michigan University police force.18
Collins had murdered Beineman in Leik’s basement while his uncle and his family were up north on vacation. He had tried to hide the bloodstains with paint. Leik figured it out and did his duty, alerting his superiors. Collins would be tried and convicted a year later and sentenced to life imprisonment (Michigan, as previously noted, never had the death penalty). But he was not charged with any of the other murders, even though police strongly believed he was connected to all of them except that of Jane Mixer, about which they had doubts. Although District Attorney William Delhay said Collins was the only suspect in the other killings, he said there was insufficient legal evidence to charge him in any of the others, and might never be. Enough ambiguity remained in the case—in particular, regarding the other men seen hanging out with Collins around the times of a couple of the abductions—to make the Pennsylvania State Police wonder if all the killers had been arrested. That was why they could not pass over the Coed Killer case when they investigated the murder of Betsy Aardsma later that year.19
It was too late for Jan to put Betsy back into her corps of bridesmaids. Her place had already been taken by one of Jan’s sorority sisters, dresses purchased, plans made. Betsy accepted the lesser role of co–punch bowl attendant with Jan’s cousin, Jean Yamaoka, with good humor. The rest of the summer leading up to the wedding and Betsy’s planned departure for Penn State was as typical as a summer like that could be. Jim Brandt, Jan’s fiancé, was working for DuPont in Charleston, West Virginia, so Jan and Betsy saw a lot of each other. The Sasamoto family was hosting some Japanese exchange students, and Jan and Betsy showed them around Holland. That was one of the things Jan remembered about that last summer with her old friend. She said Betsy seemed very happy with the idea of marrying David and having children rather than going into the Peace Corps.20
Betsy also bade farewell to Peggy Wich, who was moving to Washington, DC, on August 11. They went out for drinks at Coral Gables in Saugatuck on the evening of Saturday, August 9, the same weekend as the Tate-LaBianca murders in California. After that, they drove to Oval Beach across the river in Douglas, where they sat on the warm sand, listened to the waves lap on the shore, and talked about David and how he had changed her life. “And that was the last I saw her,” Peggy said.21
Chapter 18
Making the Best of Things
After Jan’s wedding on August 25, 1969, Betsy occupied her time working as a volunteer at Holland Hospital, much as she had done during her senior year in high school. David, meanwhile, prepared for the start of medical school, which he assumed would begin at roughly the same time as Betsy’s graduate school courses in State College. But he was wrong. A couple of weeks before David thought he was supposed to be there, he received a letter from the medical school informing him that orientation had begun, and where was he? David phoned Betsy in a panic. As always, she was the voice of calm, saying, “Let’s get ready and go.”1
David would be one of 155 students at the medical school, and one of 35 from outside Pennsylvania. He would be a hundred miles away and busy during nearly every waking hour with his studies. That was how it was. That was how he was. She had learned this early on in their relationship, when they were still seniors at the University of Michigan. Not that her study habits were lax, but his were ferocious. When they kissed and said good-bye, she promised to write him every day and—having no car—come to see him on weekends via the bus that ran between State College and Harrisburg, the state capital. Betsy watched David’s car with the Illinois plates fade in the distance and realized that she knew the name of no one on the Penn State campus except her new roommate, Sharon Brandt, a zoology student from Oyster Bay, Long Island.2
If not for David, she would have been in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, fulfilling her dream. Or, at the very least, starting graduate work in English at Michigan. But her mother and father and uncle and aunt had been unrelenting about her not going back to Ann Arbor. David had left little doubt he would move on if she went to Africa. So she had come to Penn State, to an English program that was good and getting better but had nowhere near the prestige of the one at Michigan. One of her fellow graduate students, Robert Braman, even asked her about it one day after class—the “Why Penn State?” question. Her answer was not about the program or about David, but about the “creepy murders” at Michigan and the need to escape that danger.3
And then she remembered that she loved David and vowed to make the best of it. Betsy walked back to her room in Atherton Hall
, a four-story redbrick dormitory at the corner of College Avenue and Shortlidge Road, built in the 1930s. Atherton was a smallish, genteel sort of place as dorms went, a notch above the typical utilitarian accommodations at Penn State. There were just under three hundred rooms. In the lobby, a massive grandfather clock showed students how much time they had left when they were hurrying to wherever they were going. Betsy unlocked the door to Room 5A, which was in a corner on the ground floor near an exit door. Sharon was not there. Like most roommates, they were alike in some ways and different in others. Betsy smoked and Sharon didn’t, for example, but Sharon remembered that Betsy was “a polite smoker” who was considerate of her feelings. The room was tidy and there was no unpacking left to do. Betsy was a neat freak and had already hung up her dresses in her closet and put the rest of her clothes in her dresser. Plopping down at her desk, she sketched a couple of aimless doodles, which she was always doing, then decided she wanted to be outside on such a beautiful day in late September.4
The differences between Penn State and Michigan were many. Happy Valley was a little over half the size of the University of Michigan and offered about as many cultural events in a semester as Michigan offered on a typical weekend. Detroit and its suburbs added even more, and Chicago was a three-and-a-half-hour train ride away. Penn State was in the middle of nowhere, and if you didn’t have a car, you were stuck. An advertisement in the Penn State Daily Collegian on September 21, 1969, the start of new student orientation, joked: “Woodstock? Not quite, but we’re trying with Blood, Sweat, and Tears.” The jazz-rock band, then at the peak of its popularity, had performed at Woodstock that August (it was left out of the movie, a fate shared by several bands) but was still a B-list attraction, and everyone knew it. Now they were scheduled to play the HUB—Hetzel Union Building—on October 5.
