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

by David DeKok

  There is the Lancaster County of tourist imagination and a somewhat richer and darker reality. On one hand, it was a place of agricultural abundance, supposedly the second-richest farming area in the United States. Here lived the Amish, offshoots of the Anabaptists in Europe, a sect of Plain People who wore nineteenth-century clothing and shunned electricity, land-line telephones in their houses, and automobiles. They spoke an ancient form of German, and in the mid-twentieth century became a nearly irresistible tourist attraction.

  The vast majority of Lancaster County residents were not Amish and not farmers. But many, like the Haefners, were of German descent, although they had long since dispensed with the German language. As a general rule, German Catholics tended to live in the city of Lancaster, where the Catholic churches originally were, while the German Protestants—of many denominations—lived everywhere but dominated the rest of the county.

  Yet despite its churchiness, and for reasons that remain unclear, Lancaster County is also known for its strange and brutal murders and murderers. Every locale has murders, but these were far from the ordinary: adults killing children, children killing children, children killing adults, and adults killing adults out of sexual dysfunction. Author Richard Gehman wrote about one of the latter in his 1954 book, Murder in Paradise.

  In 1950, Edward L. Gibbs, a senior at the then all-male Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, got to know Marian Baker, a twenty-two-year-old secretary in the bursar’s office at the college. Gibbs, who was unhappily married, took Baker, who was engaged to be married, for a ride one day and bludgeoned and strangled her to death. He hid the body and returned to campus, where he showered and went out to dinner with his wife. For the next few days, tormented by guilt, Gibbs thought of going to the police and confessing. He asked two fellow students, sons of undertakers, how long it took a body to decompose. He even went to a funeral director and asked if a strangler’s fingerprints could be recovered from the neck of his victim, saying he needed the information for a criminology class. After Marian’s body was finally discovered, Gibbs took to appearing each night at the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal to buy the paper when it came off the presses in the wee hours of the morning.

  Lancaster police detectives eventually heard of Gibbs’s questions about bodily decay and made further inquiries at the college. One day, Gibbs appeared at the office of F&M president Theodore Distler and confessed to the murder. An aide to Distler then took Gibbs on a remarkable walk across campus to his own office, where detectives were waiting. They took Gibbs for a ride, and he showed them where he dumped his weapon and some of Marian’s belongings. They asked him about a number of other unsolved murders around the state, including that of student Rachel Taylor at Penn State University in 1940. Gibbs was of no help in that regard.6

  Psychiatrists who examined the F&M student portrayed him—this was in 1950—as the son of an overprotective, smothering mother and a weak, ineffectual father. They didn’t call him a homosexual, but their account today reads like a description of a deeply closeted and repressed gay man who also hated women. Gibbs dated women and eventually married one, but only because that was what he thought he was supposed to do in life. District Attorney John Milton Ranck found the psychiatric testimony incredible or irrelevant. He believed Gibbs simply had made a sexual advance to Baker and killed her in a rage after she rejected him and threatened to tell the college, or his wife. “Gibbs was not insane,” Ranck told Gehman. “He was devilishly clever. It is frightening to think how close this fellow came to getting away with this crime.” The jury agreed, and Gibbs was sentenced to death. He died in the electric chair at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview on April 23, 1951.7

  What is notable here is that Franklin & Marshall College, its staff and students, had helped the police solve the Marian Baker murder in ways that counted. No one in the community protected Gibbs or looked the other way, and he paid the price for his awful crime. The college moved on, having done its civic duty. Penn State University would have done well to take note.

  Rick Haefner was intellectually gifted and pursued the college preparatory course at J. P. McCaskey High School in Lancaster. He was active in high school theater, playing the role of the boss’s son, Tony Kirby, in You Can’t Take It With You, and worked on the student newspaper. His grades were good enough to gain him admission to Franklin & Marshall College when he graduated in 1961. By then, he knew he wanted to become a geologist, and F&M had one of the better undergraduate geology programs in the country. He had worked at the college’s North Museum, a natural history museum, as a volunteer guide, lecturer, and researcher—his description—since the age of twelve or thirteen. The curator, John W. Price Sr., became his friend and mentor and fired his passion for museum work. Rick’s house at 217 Nevin Street was close enough to the college that he could walk there in fifteen minutes, so he lived at home. He was a dedicated student and did well in his classes, but made few lasting impressions on his classmates. Lane Schultz, a geology major who was a year behind Haefner, recalled little beyond Rick being a sharp dresser and wearing khaki pants nearly all the time.8

  Psychologists tend to believe today that pedophiles are born that way, comprising 1 to 5 percent of the male population. Rick may well have seemed normal for a long time. He went through the public schools in Lancaster, but by the time he reached McCaskey, he had begun to set himself apart from other boys. They considered him to be gay, although cruder terms were probably employed. He was harassed mercilessly, according to his cousin, Chris Haefner, and, as noted, began carrying a homemade knife for protection.9

  Rick first became known to police at age nineteen in the fall of 1962, when he solicited a boy from Wharton Elementary School for sex. At the time, he was a sophomore at Franklin & Marshall College and working as a counselor in the Grey-Y program at the Lancaster YMCA, where the crime occurred. All we know about the incident is contained in a one-paragraph document in the files of the Lancaster Police Department, which says they were informed of the incident after it reached the attention of District Attorney Alfred Alspach. Why he wasn’t arrested is unknown.10

  Although Rick did not attend Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, barely a block from his parents’ house, he did participate in the parish’s Boy Scout troop, which had been in existence since 1913. Sometime after he enrolled at Franklin & Marshall, he became an assistant scoutmaster of Troop 24. Handsome and clean-cut, Rick was the picture of a Boy Scout leader.

  He may well have molested boys throughout his time with the troop, but the crisis came early in the summer of 1965, when Rick’s sexual recklessness seemed to peak. Michael D. Witmer, who was in Troop 24 when Haefner was an assistant scoutmaster, remembered Rick on one hand as “a really cool, smart guy” who would do anything for him or his friends. He also sought to endear himself to their parents, sometimes simply showing up at the front door to visit their sons, other times volunteering to drive them places. Anyone who has been in Boy Scouts will recognize the type, at least as it was supposed to be. The boys gravitated toward him because he was closer in age to them than their scoutmaster—more like an older brother who seemed to know a lot about the world and was totally into the outdoor Boy Scout life.

  Today, what Haefner did would be called grooming, meaning to befriend the boys, to give them things their parents would not or could not, and in so doing, to lessen their resistance to the sexual activities he envisioned. It also meant easing the concerns of their parents about a young adult male spending time alone with their preteen sons, much easier in 1965 than in today’s justifiably cynical world. Like so many pedophiles, he had them completely fooled. Witmer recalled vividly his shock on the day when his best friend, Dave S., told him how Haefner had reached into his sleeping bag on one of the troop’s campouts and fondled his genitals. His story poured out in a torrent of fear, confusion, and self-loathing.11

  Dave S. today recalls Haefner with anger and bitterness, believing that
his former Scout leader stole an important part of his childhood. He said Haefner molested him four or five times in 1963 or 1964, usually at either Camp Chiquetan, a former Boy Scout camp in Lancaster County near the confluence of Conestoga Creek and the Susquehanna River, or on private land along Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, where Troop 24 sometimes camped. Dave S. suspects that Haefner picked him because his father, a disabled, one-armed World War II veteran, seemed nonthreatening. Witmer urged his friend to check with other members of the troop to see if any of them had had similar experiences with Rick. When several admitted they had, Witmer urged Dave to tell his parents or somebody in authority what had happened.12

  Word eventually did reach the parents, who in turn complained to the scoutmaster and Father John S. Paukovits, the priest at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Father Paukovits, who was popular and respected among the boys (they called him “Father Jawbreaker” for the treats he gave them in school), called Haefner in for a meeting. Whether or not Rick confessed isn’t known, but Paukovits concluded that the accusations against him were valid. Witmer remembers a parent telling him and the other boys in the troop, after meeting with Paukovits, that the priest believed Rick was sick beyond help. “As I recall, after our church pastor investigated, Haefner was relieved from his assistant scoutmaster position and, incredibly, that was the end of it,” Witmer said. Actually, it wasn’t. The troop leadership reported Haefner to the regional Boy Scout Council, which in turn reported what had happened to the national headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America. Haefner was banned from Boy Scout work for life.13

  But no one informed the police, and Rick continued to work his summer job as a day camp supervisor at Camp Optimist for the Lancaster Recreation Commission. An application he filled out on January 4, 1965, to work as a summer playground supervisor for the Lancaster Recreation Commission still listed the Boy Scouts as a reference, suggesting that his activities had not yet come to light at that time. He received the second-highest rating for his leadership that summer, meaning he was considered good but not outstanding. Interestingly, the one area in which Haefner didn’t measure up on the evaluation form was in the category “Demonstrates mature judgment; common sense,” in which he received a middle rating of “Fair; usually shows good judgment.” It seems amazing that Rick was able to end the summer with a generally good performance rating. How someone could work well with accusations of child molestation hanging over his head is a mystery. He seemed to be able to disassociate himself from his crimes, in part by explaining them away in his own mind.14

  The strange thing was that he was allowed to work at a day camp at all, but there was no Internet then, and it was much easier for misdeeds to stay hidden. He had worked summer jobs for the Lancaster Recreation Commission since at least the summer of 1961, and had come back in the summer of 1965 after graduating from Franklin & Marshall and before starting his graduate work in geology at Penn State in the fall. Because this job was ultimately with the Lancaster School District, Rick was required to obtain a temporary teaching certificate from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Instruction, today the Department of Education, before he could take the job. The one he obtained in July 1962 was issued before the YMCA incident that November, but the renewal the following summer came months afterward. G. Wayne Glick, dean and acting president of Franklin & Marshall, even signed the application form attesting to Rick’s “good moral character.” What this says as much as anything is that Rick had no arrest record, that word of his pedophilia was confined to a very small group of people, and that he was good at deceiving the world.

  In late August 1965, Rick persuaded a trusting single mother in Lancaster to let him take her sons, ages ten and eleven years, on vacation with him for five days to Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City was a popular vacation spot for central Pennsylvania residents, three and a half hours from Lancaster by car. They were boys he had gotten to know during his day camp work that summer. After plying them with more spending money than their mother ever could, and providing plenty of good times on the beach and boardwalk, Haefner evidently molested them both. The boys did not go to the police, or even to the motel desk clerk, but on the day they returned, they did tell their mother. She angrily confronted Haefner and then unloaded on Philip Bomberger III, chairman of the Lancaster Recreation Commission. What she didn’t do, as far as can be determined, was call the police.15

  Bomberger, to his credit, tried to assess what had happened, and also tried to help Rick deal with his demons. After a one-on-one meeting on August 30, 1965, Bomberger wrote that Rick “appeared very nervous and shaken about the reaction of the victims’ mother. . . . Richard said he felt only compassion for this mother, and if he had done anything wrong, he wasn’t aware of what it was.” He explained to Rick that he had sexually assaulted both boys, but his words seemed to go over Haefner’s head. “He said he was only trying to do something good by taking the boys on a vacation before they [went] away to school. Richard said the boys never complained about anything, so he didn’t realize anything was wrong.” It was classic pedophile behavior: groom the boys with money and good times to the point where they’ll reluctantly submit to molestation for fear of angering their sugar daddy.16

  At the time, Haefner seemed mainly to be concerned with the impact on his brother, his parents, and himself if the mother’s complaint became public. “Richard’s immediate response was that he had only two alternatives—to run away or to commit suicide,” Bomberger wrote. His brother George, about to graduate from Penn State with an engineering degree, planned to work in the defense industry and could possibly lose his security clearance. His parents might have to leave town, or could even die from the shock, Rick said. And it might lead Penn State to rescind his acceptance to graduate school in geology, a legitimate fear if not an unwarranted outcome. Given Rick’s later history, it is possible that all of the fears he expressed were a con job to defuse the problem with Bomberger.

  In fact, Bomberger consulted with two medical professionals who had different opinions on whether Rick should be reported to the police. Dr. Charles H. Kurtz, the family physician of the two boys, told him that he was leaning, albeit reluctantly, to the idea that Rick’s crimes should be reported to the police for his own good, but that he first wanted to consult a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert J. Kurey, to get his opinion. Kurey, a member of Sacred Heart Church, where he was head usher, was adamantly opposed to involving the police. “Dr. Kurey’s opinion was that we have no legal obligation to report this person to the police, and that we should make every effort to protect this boy’s reputation and future. Dr. Kurey also warned that this individual was sick and needed help immediately,” Bomberger wrote in his report.17

  Bomberger then arranged for Rick to get immediate psychiatric help, from Dr. Kurey, which he was supposed to continue with a local practitioner in State College in late September, after he reported to the Penn State campus. Rick did see Dr. Kurey on September 13. But early in 1966, Bomberger made follow-up calls to both Kurtz and Kurey. Neither, it turned out, had checked to see whether Rick had continued receiving psychiatric care at Penn State. They had just passed him along.18

  In the 1960s, the dominant belief was that pedophilia was more of a civil offense against decency than a criminal offense that destroyed a young, innocent soul. It was bad, yes, but something to be worked out, perhaps with a stern admonishment to the perpetrator to get counseling and sin no more. Philip Jenkins, author of Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America and coincidentally a Penn State professor of history and religious studies, writes that America has swung back and forth in its attitudes toward pedophiles. Between the Progressive Era and the end of World War II, the country saw child molesters as “malignant sex fiends,” but after the war embarked upon twenty-five years of a more nuanced and libertarian view of pedophilia, including, among some, the belief that it was an innocuous offense. Jenkins writes that during the 1960s, the orthodoxy was that “molestation
was a very infrequent offense unlikely to cause significant harm to the vast majority of [victims] . . . and molesters were confused inadequates unlikely to repeat their offenses.” He wrote that child victims in those years were “often regarded as seducers” who bore a share of responsibility for what happened to them. In the 1960s, no one seemed inclined to ask the police to arrest Rick.19

  But there may have been another reason Rick stayed out of jail. Professor Roger Cuffey at Penn State, who employed Rick as a geology teaching assistant for three semesters, from January 1969 to June 1970, said Haefner came to him in the spring of 1969 and told him a story about how the district attorney of Lancaster County had tried to bring molestation charges against him several years earlier, based on a complaint from two teenagers who had worked with him and with his mentor, Professor John W. Price Sr., at the North Museum at Franklin & Marshall College. The case described by Cuffey doesn’t sound like either the Boy Scouts or the Ocean City case, so perhaps it was yet another example of Haefner accosting and molesting boys in his community. According to Cuffey, Rick went to Philadelphia and obtained help from Arlen Specter, then an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia and, later, a United States senator. Cuffey said Rick talked to him at length about how Specter had helped him. Could it have happened? Yes, although there is no known proof that it did.20

  Assistant district attorneys in Philadelphia at that time were allowed to have private law practices on the side. When Specter left the Philadelphia law firm today known as Dechert, Price & Rhoads in 1959 to become an assistant DA, he also organized a private law practice and accepted any number of cases over the next several years. He would take private cases even when he was heavily involved in something else. On Election Day in November 1965, for example, when Specter was on the ballot as the Republican candidate for district attorney, he voted and then went to federal court to represent a client in a product liability case. If Specter did help Haefner, it might have been because he was intrigued by Haefner’s claim of law enforcement corruption in Lancaster County. Those kinds of cases drew Specter like a dog to a fire whistle. In his autobiography, Specter made much of his “truth-seeking” and fights against government malfeasance. Did he make a few phone calls to Lancaster and head off charges? Maybe; maybe not.