by David DeKok
Betsy would have recognized Haefner instantly and might well have let her disgust show on her face. Perhaps she said something sotto voce, unheard even in the stillness of the stacks by anyone but him. Certainly, neither Erdely nor Uafinda nor Richard Allen, the third witness, heard any verbal unpleasantness, but perhaps it occurred seconds before they moved into auditory range. More likely Betsy did not confront Haefner and moved quickly away from him, intent on finding the book she needed so she could get out of there. But the damage was done, as far as Haefner would have been concerned. “Rick would never have allowed anyone to upend his career,” said his cousin, Christopher Haefner.9
Haefner’s rage toward Betsy could have been fueled by a mixture of fear and anger. She had rejected him, and now might report him to the university for the porn and maybe for masturbation in a public place. In his mind, and possibly in reality, that could have been enough to get him kicked out of Penn State on moral grounds and denied the master’s degree he had earned in geology. He was well aware of the danger he faced from this sort of accusation. There would be no PhD, no career in the field, geology, in which he believed himself destined for greatness. Everything he had worked for was at risk.10
Because there are no known living witnesses, we can only speculate about what happened next, filling in between the known facts. It probably went something like this:
Haefner felt his anger surging. In a rage, he reached into his jacket pocket for the homemade shiv that he had carried since McCaskey High School and removed the ball of tape on the tip. Jumping to his feet, he followed Betsy into the Core. Absorbed in looking at the Library of Congress call numbers on book spines, she did not immediately react when Rick Haefner approached. She believed him to be a creep but probably considered him relatively harmless. Then she saw his eyes and was terrified. He was tall and powerful, six-foot-one, five inches taller than her, and 195 pounds to her 125 pounds. Before she could scream or run, Haefner had his hand over her mouth. He raised his other hand and she saw the weapon. In a blind panic, Betsy climbed backward onto a shelf, which only made her a better target. In an instant, he slammed the blade horizontally into her chest about midway between the bottom curves of her breasts. It was an angry blow, delivered with no hesitation, powerful enough to penetrate the sternum and pierce her heart (which is directly behind the breastbone). Nearby in the maze of the stacks, Joao Uafinda heard a sound like a fist hitting a chest, but no scream. Haefner saw the life go out of her eyes. Suddenly spent, he let go of her and the weapon, briefly appalled at what he had done. Betsy seemed to clutch a shelf but then fell hard to the floor. Her weight caused the shelf to give way, spilling scholarly books around and on top of her body. One of her feet was still propped up on a lower shelf from that last, desperate effort to escape.11
Haefner then probably tried to pull the shiv loose. There was almost no blood, but it was firmly implanted in her breastbone. He wiggled it until it came out, in the process slightly widening the exterior wound and making it appear as if it had been made with a larger blade. Where was all the blood? There was nothing on his hands. He had to get out of there. Gingerly placing the weapon in his jacket pocket, he took off on a run, intending to go up the nearby staircase.
Haefner slowed when he saw Erdely and Uafinda. “Somebody had better help that girl,” he said, pointing back at the Core. But it would not be him. The Dutch pornography lay abandoned on the carrel, soon to be found by George Keibler’s investigators, and Betsy was quite dead.
Chapter 21
The Night Visitor
A little after 6:00 p.m. on the evening of Betsy Aardsma’s murder, Professor Lauren A. Wright and his wife, Myrtle, had just sat down to dinner in their modern home at 219 Ronan Drive in a woodsy development on the outskirts of State College. Wright was a geology professor and chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, a post he had held since 1963. She had been a secretary in the department, and he met her soon after arriving at Penn State from California in the fall of 1961. They were a gentle and cultured couple. He was forty-three when he met her and she was forty-two. It was his first marriage but her second, and she had a son from her first husband. Myrtle, a devout Quaker, spent her days in private study of the Greek language, Greek mythology and history, or playing the recorder. Wright spent time away each year mapping and studying Death Valley, the great desert wilderness in California that was his life’s work. He would leave almost every year in late September, often accompanied by a graduate student, and come back just before Christmas.1
When the doorbell rang, Professor Wright got up to answer the door and came face-to-face with Rick Haefner, who was one of his graduate students. They had spent the fall terms of 1967 and 1968 together in Death Valley. Wright considered him to be a “pretty good” geologist, “very diligent in his work,” and had signed his master’s thesis about six weeks earlier, giving it his official stamp of approval. Haefner, who was twenty-five years old, was out of breath and disheveled. A kind man who tried to see the best in everybody, Wright instinctively invited Haefner inside. Thus began one of the strangest episodes in the Betsy Aardsma case, and one that may have been a significant factor in the failure to solve her murder.2
Some have suggested that Haefner literally ran from Pattee Library to Wright’s home, fleeing in panic from his murder of Betsy Aardsma. But Wright’s house was in the southwest corner of State College, exactly three miles from Pattee Library. While walking that distance in an hour would have been theoretically possible—indeed, Google Maps helpfully calculates the walking time at fifty-five minutes—it just doesn’t seem likely. Wright himself didn’t think that Rick walked.
After eluding Joao Uafinda, the Mozambican student who had followed him, thinking he was going to help a girl, Rick probably walked briskly to the less visible and less trafficked West Entrance of Pattee Library, went through the doors, and out into the enveloping darkness. Rick may have been the young man seen running from the front of Pattee Library minutes after the murder, but no one could give a good description of whomever it was they saw. He had the dumbest of luck. It seems exceedingly doubtful Haefner would have risked a return to his room in Atherton, even to grab his things, given that he had to expect the police soon would be in the building, poring over Betsy’s dorm room. And indeed, they were. Those two students—he did not know their names to be Erdely and Uafinda—had seen him coming out of the Core. Maybe they knew who he was. It is much more likely that Rick made his way to his car, wherever it was parked, and drove around for a time, deciding what to do.3
Haefner that afternoon and evening exhibited some traits of a piquer, or girl stabber, a rare form of sadism. As described in 1958 by Dr. J. Paul de River in his book, Crime and the Sexual Psychopath, a piquer often stabs a young woman in places associated with her femininity, such as a breast or thigh, for the thrill it brings. A photo in de River’s book shows the entry wound in the breast of a young woman, the caption noting that the weapon reached the heart, which is directly behind the breastbone, and killed her almost instantly. “Many of them desire to see blood, if possible, but they often become frightened and disappear without viewing the results of their actions. . . . Frequently such individuals will watch the newspapers to see if their acts have made the headlines,” de River wrote. He said piquers are “psychopathically tainted” but legally sane.4
Once in his car, Haefner probably stopped somewhere and disposed of his homemade shiv, which has never been found. Perhaps he even drove out of State College for a few miles and then turned around, doubling back to Wright’s house. He might have parked a distance away, fearing the police were already looking for his car, and then walked quickly through the darkness, perhaps running across the broad field at the end of Ronan Drive and then moving among the trees and shrubbery, which abounded in Wright’s neighborhood. That would account for him being out of breath.
Rick had been to Wright’s house before but was not a frequent visi
tor. He was disturbed that night, Wright remembered, asking if there was any news in the papers about a girl he knew, Betsy Aardsma, being killed in Pattee Library. In fact, the Centre Daily Times, which was then an afternoon paper, had gone to press hours before the murder. No media outlet, whether newspaper, radio, or television, is known to have had any news about Betsy’s slaying before eleven o’clock that night. Wright sat him down at the dinner table and talked with him. The professor had heard nothing about the murder, but almost nobody had at that point. Haefner stayed about an hour and then left.5
Professor Wright found Rick to be “puzzling,” never completely open when they conversed. He wondered later if his student knew more about the murder than he was letting on, and he claimed in 2010 that his concerns prompted him to go to his dean, Charles Hosler, the very next day—a Saturday on a holiday weekend—to report his suspicions. But he did not, Hosler said, not for nearly seven years. “No, had that happened, it would have been quite a different story,” Hosler said. In fairness to Wright, at the time he made that claim, he was within three years of his death and had already begun slipping into mild dementia that would grow worse with time. We can be confident that Rick’s visit happened that night because Wright told the story a number of times over the years, when he was in robust health.
Where Rick went after he left Wright is unknown. He probably drove to his parents’ house at 217 Nevin Street in Lancaster. At some point, if not that weekend, then later, he told a version of what happened in the stacks to his mother, Ere Haefner. A sharp-nosed and sharp-tongued woman, she adored her son and helped to inflate his sense of self-importance. She would have done anything for him. As Christopher Haefner put it so pointedly, if Rick had brought home Betsy in the trunk of his car, Ere would have helped him bury her body. She would never be his conscience, only his security guard. Even so, one wonders if Rick shaded the truth in what he told Ere, perhaps calling it a foolish accident so as not to come off as a cold-blooded killer. We will never know. All we know is that she did not turn him in.6
Haefner returned to campus after Thanksgiving, perhaps worried that his absence would draw unwanted attention. The state police were indeed on the lookout for students who had abruptly dropped out of Penn State after Betsy’s murder. He was looking forward to receiving his master’s degree in geology on December 14 and had already begun work on his doctoral degree. What plausible excuse could he make for suddenly dropping out now?
Within a week of the murder, Rick was summoned for a routine interview at the state police command center in the Boucke Building. Sharon Brandt had reportedly mentioned Rick’s interest in Betsy to investigators. Because of Professor Wright’s silence, Trooper Ken Schleiden had no reason to suspect that Haefner was anything more than a concerned acquaintance of Betsy’s. He talked about his dates with her and of learning about her death—he claimed it was on Saturday, November 29—while eating a meal in the HUB.7
Schleiden has little or no memory of the report he wrote forty-five years ago. Other retired troopers say he has beaten himself up over not being more suspicious of Haefner. But he ought to be forgiven. Schleiden had no idea that Haefner was a pedophile, or that he had made that visit to Professor Wright an hour after the murder, because Wright didn’t tell anyone. Rick had never been arrested. The odds were slim that anyone could have unearthed Rick’s background minus a good tip, especially at a time when the state police were interviewing thousands of students and professors. On the other hand, Larry Paul Maurer, who did set off alarms, seemed bound and determined to come across as a plausible suspect. The continuing interest in him by the state police was as understandable as the decision not to probe more deeply into Haefner’s past. Investigators go with their instincts, barring anything else. And sometimes, like human beings everywhere, they are wrong. And too, Haefner was a clever psychopath accustomed to lying to cover up his secret life. There was much to conceal, but he was good at it. 8
Part IV: Flight from Justice
The Earth has not managed to swallow me into the abyss
Nor has the sea engulfed me with its raging storms
I have fled from the law and escaped the arena
I’ve even stained my hands with blood
Only to end up here, destitute, exiled from my country, abandoned.
—Opening lines, Fellini: Satyricon, 1969
Chapter 22
Bad Seed
When he died in 1916 after a long illness, the German immigrant Joseph Haefner, owner of the Haefner Empire Brewing Co., was a business aristocrat in his adopted hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Intelligencer Journal newspaper memorialized him as a “progressive, straightforward business man and a good citizen in every respect.” His life had been a tribute to the American dream. Son of a brewer from the city of Bamberg in Bavaria, Haefner had arrived in America in 1872 at age twenty-four. He spent the next fourteen years as a journeyman, perfecting his knowledge of the beer business. He worked for a succession of breweries in New York City and Reading, Pottsville, Philadelphia, and Lancaster, in Pennsylvania. Finally settling in Lancaster in 1886, he acquired a brewery at the corner of Lime and Locust Streets and expanded it over the years to three times its original size. He sold beer in the region under brands that included Kaiser, a pale ale, and Muenchener, a dark Bavarian ale, all delivered in horse-drawn wagons. And he prospered.1
In 1874, Joseph Haefner married a young widow and single mother, Margaret M. Fisher, whose father was the proprietor of the Reading Depot hotel in Lancaster. She had been married to Henry Bauman, who died at age thirty-one in 1869, a year after the birth of their son, Henry C. The son always went by Harry, and was the direct ancestor of Rick Haefner. News stories never mentioned Margaret’s first marriage, always asserting that Joseph married “Miss Margaret Fisher.” He gave Harry his family name, which suggested he had adopted him, but referred to Harry as “my stepson.” The couple, who were Catholic, went on to have seven more children, of whom five survived to adulthood. In 1890, to house his large family, Joseph built a redbrick mansion at 134 Locust Street, across from his brewery and set amid the average row houses of the working class. It was gabled and Victorian but decidedly unfancy on the outside, a product of his practical German outlook.2
Not everything he touched turned to gold. By the time he died in 1916, Joseph Haefner was beset by financial woes brought on by his investment in the Union Irrigation Co. of Opelousas, Louisiana, a venture that joined Southern dreams and Northern capital. Founded in 1903 as the Union Rice & Irrigation Co., the venture aimed to open up five hundred thousand acres of rich, clay soil roughly sixty miles west of Baton Rouge for rice cultivation. What happened to push the company into bankruptcy around 1914 is unknown, but Haefner’s obituary observed that “he was a large loser financially” as a result of its downfall.3 His will made equal provision for his five children with Margaret and his stepson, Harry, who was accounted for separately in the will. Each received $10,000, the equivalent of more than $210,000 today.4
When Prohibition finally ended on December 5, 1933, the Haefners went back into the beer business, producing 46,800 barrels of Pilsener-type beer during 1934. But they and the other three remaining breweries in Lancaster were hobbled by old and inefficient production facilities. None of them had modernized in the years running up to Prohibition. Haefner Brewing Company, as it was then known, went out of business in 1945, too small to compete with the large national brands and decades before the advent of microbrews. In 1946, the same year of Harry C. Haefner’s death, the brewery filed for bankruptcy and was no more.5
Harry left behind six sons, Francis J., Henry C., Paul A., Leon J., Joseph G., and George P. Haefner, who was the youngest, born in 1908. In the late 1930s, George married Ere Seaber. Leon J. Haefner, his brother and the grandfather of Chris Haefner, married one of Ere’s sisters. That bound the two families even closer. Ere bore George two sons, George P. Jr. in 1938 and Richard Ch
arles, who came along in 1943.
In the spring of 1951, George Haefner moved his family to 217 Nevin Street in Lancaster, in a working-class neighborhood of older homes. The house, on the end of a row of long, narrow houses with nearly identical front porches, was a far cry from the mansion his father and grandfather had inhabited. But he was not a prosperous businessman, just an average Joe who sold insurance. The wealth of the Haefner family ancestor was long gone. Only the prestige of the name remained, and even that was fading with time. The house adjoined an alley that intersected Nevin Street, and the kitchen door opened to a small landing and steps that led down to the ground. Across the alley was an old four-stall garage with heavy wooden doors that belonged to one of the homeowners around the corner on Chestnut Street.
Farther up Nevin Street in the other direction was Sacred Heart Catholic Church and its parish school. George and Ere Haefner were nominal members of the church but rarely attended Mass. When Rick was born, they did not have him christened or baptized, a priest there would later say, referring to the traditional Christian ceremony by which an infant is admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven and absolved of all sins. Nor did they send him to Catholic school.
