by David DeKok
In the spring of 1991, the Lancaster Recreation Commission and the City of Lancaster responded to the lawsuit and challenged the legal underpinning of Haefner’s request for a writ of mandamus. They argued that Haefner had not demonstrated that the city or the LRC had any legal duty to expunge his personnel file and asked that his “frivolous” lawsuit be dismissed. It finally was, on June 19, 1991.
Chapter 34
Thinking about Ted Bundy
In 1982, Sergeant George Keibler, then nearing the end of thirty years of service with the Pennsylvania State Police, received a phone call from a woman in State College who had read The Stranger Beside Me, a nonfiction book by Ann Rule published in 1980 about serial killer Ted Bundy. The caller knew that Keibler was the lead investigator of Betsy Aardsma’s murder. She wondered whether Bundy might have killed Betsy Aardsma. This call launched Keibler on his last major effort to solve Betsy’s murder.1
Keibler was less than two years away from retirement, planning to call it quits on December 31, 1983. It had been many years since Betsy had been found on the floor of Pattee Library at Penn State, and despite much sound and fury, the state police were no further along in figuring out who had murdered her than they were on November 28, 1969. Keibler had told reporter Taft Wireback in 1972 that Betsy’s murder would probably not be solved unless the killer sought psychiatric help or was apprehended in connection with another crime. Bundy seemed to fit into the second part of his prediction.
What Keibler saw in Ann Rule’s book intrigued him. Officially, Bundy had killed at least thirty young women in six states, although he famously boasted that thirty was one digit too few. The tall, dark, and handsome Bundy killed young women as predictably and casually as most people go to the grocery store. Some were teenagers, some in their early twenties. Often, he killed women on or near college campuses. Bundy had spent his earliest years in Pennsylvania. His mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell of Philadelphia, had been left pregnant by Lloyd Marshall, who supposedly was a student at Penn State University. Marshall didn’t stay in the picture, and Eleanor gave birth to Ted at a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont. Moreover, Rule described how Bundy, beginning in early 1969, came back to Pennsylvania from Seattle looking for information about his birth father. He seemed to be killing women everywhere, Keibler mused. Why not at Penn State? As a theory, it had promise, although he learned only later that Ann Rule had erred in saying Lloyd Marshall attended Penn State. He had actually attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, if he existed at all.2
Bundy stayed in Philadelphia for the first six months of 1969, even enrolling at Temple University. He was back in Seattle in the fall, attending the University of Washington and meeting with a female friend, one he didn’t kill, on September 26, 1969. Yet much was still unclear. Not every week, or even every month, in Bundy’s life was accounted for. Rule wrote in the updated edition of her book in 2000 that there could have been many other victims of Ted Bundy. She called it an impossible task to determine precisely where he was on a particular date. “Ted was always a traveler,” Rule wrote. “He would say he was going one place, and head somewhere else. He hated to be made accountable for his whereabouts.” So yes, he was in Seattle on September 26, 1969, but did anyone really know where he was on November 28?3
Keibler set out to learn as much as he could about Ted Bundy and his time in Pennsylvania, making numerous phone calls to Ann Rule, who was cooperative and even mentioned a “Pennsylvania homicide detective” who was clearly Keibler in the 2000 edition. Even so, she got the story half wrong, writing that he was investigating the murder of “a beautiful dark-haired young woman” who was stabbed to death in the stacks of a library, but at Temple University in Philadelphia, which is jarring to see in print. Detective Robert D. Keppel, who had investigated several of Bundy’s early murders for the King County Police Major Crimes Unit in Seattle, was less friendly, Keibler said, but did answer his questions.4
Keibler believed that Ted Bundy fit the description of the man seen running out of the Core seconds after Betsy was struck down. “He’s five foot, eleven [actually six feet tall, according to records], he’s a young guy, he’s dressed up. You look at Allen’s statement. . . . He’s dressed better than a student. He has a tie and white shirt on. Students don’t dress like that normally,” Keibler said. He readily acknowledged that no one knew where Bundy was on November 28, 1969. Could it have been Pattee Library? Maybe; maybe not.5
But in the end, Keibler believed Bundy’s pornography addiction was the key to linking him to the Aardsma murder. “The key to this case, as I’ve told you before, are those [Dutch porn] books in the corner,” he said. “That’s the key. Either that son of a bitch [the man who was reading the porn book] is her murderer, or else he witnessed the whole thing.” And if it was Bundy, it was safe to assume he didn’t go there to work on an English paper. Ann Rule told Keibler that she knew Bundy liked porn at the time they worked together answering phones in 1971 at a crisis hotline in Seattle. Keppel told him that when they searched Bundy’s residence, he observed a lot of porn lying around. What if it was Bundy who had abandoned the expensive porn book in his rush to flee Pattee Library?6
If it was, Bundy’s fingerprints should have been all over it. So Keibler requested copies of Bundy’s prints from the warden of Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida, where Ted was on Death Row. He received Bundy’s fingerprints, palm prints, and toe prints. When he contacted the state police crime lab in Harrisburg—where the Aardsma evidence was supposed to be stored, since it was part of an active criminal investigation—he was told that sometime between 1970 and 1980, it had been shipped to Troop G headquarters in Hollidaysburg, with no notice to anyone involved in the case. There was no record of the transfer.
Upset at not having been notified, Keibler went to Troop G and asked the Bureau of Criminal Investigation lab to retrieve the book and see if they could find Bundy’s prints. They agreed to do so. “For a month, I’m after them,” Keibler said. They finally came back and told him that Bundy’s prints were not on the book. But it wasn’t just that. They claimed that nobody’s were. Keibler found this hard to believe—that a porn book found in a library would have no fingerprints at all. “If that’s Ted Bundy sitting there with that book, son of a bitch’s prints have to be on that book. It’s that simple.”7
Still hoping to save his investigation, Keibler wondered whether Bundy would talk to him. He again called down to Raiford Prison, where they warned him that Bundy was nuts. “He may tell you to come down, and you come down, and he may tell you to go screw yourself, or he may talk to you,” Keibler remembers being told. But the commanding officer of Troop G, Captain Vincent Fiorani, would not let him go to Florida, unconvinced that the trip would be worthwhile. Keibler argued that Bundy might spill information about other unsolved murders or disappearances in Pennsylvania. “I could have gone higher than him and around, okay?” he said. But he did not. “That is a tragedy, that the state police didn’t do that,” Keibler said. Seemingly, his investigation of Ted Bundy was over. He wrote a report saying that Bundy was a suspect, but that he could not prove his involvement.8
Now the question became, with Keibler retiring at the end of 1983, who would take over the Aardsma investigation? He was fifty-two years old and had been head of criminal investigation at the Rockview barracks since 1965. The Aardsma case had been his responsibility since Lieutenant William Kimmel handed it off to him in December 1969, three weeks after the murder. During those fourteen years, Keibler saw no reason to hand it off to anyone else.
His last day on the job, Keibler burned the hypnosis tape of one of the Nittany Mall rapist victims of 1969, keeping a promise he had made to her parents all those years before, when Corporal Dan Brode had insisted on devoting time and resources to his theory that the rapist—who was believed to be a working man from the country and had probably never been on the Penn State campus—was the most likely suspect in the
Aardsma murder. They had pursued the idea much longer than they should have.
In January, Keibler phoned Captain Fiorani and asked him who he was going to assign to the case. To his dismay, Fiorani was noncommittal. “I said, ‘Captain, you have to have someone sitting on top of it.’ ” Fiorani, who clearly didn’t agree, said he just didn’t have an answer for him. In his typically plainspoken manner, Keibler said, “Well, make up your mind. I should have a month to talk to him, back and forth.” Fiorani questioned whether that was necessary, saying the new man could just read the report. Keibler snorted. “I said, ‘C’mon; there’s sixteen or seventeen hundred pages, plus fourteen years.’ ” It would take anyone a serious amount of time to get up to speed on a case like this. It also might have been worthwhile to have a new set of eyes go over the information that had accumulated over fourteen years. But it wasn’t to be.9
“No decision was ever made,” Keibler said. “I retired and did my thing. I became aware that nobody was assigned to follow it up.” Eventually, a cold case officer was assigned to the Aardsma case, but neither he nor any of his successors ever went to Keibler for a briefing about what had happened, he said.
A big part of the problem, as it had always been, was that Betsy Aardsma was not from Pennsylvania. She had no family in the state to pressure legislators for action, to complain to the state police regularly about the lack of an arrest, or simply to be angry. No legislators are known to have asked pointed questions about the Aardsma case to the state police commissioner at the annual budget hearings in Harrisburg over the years, a common occasion for questioning heads of agencies about their failures. Nor were Penn State’s presidents questioned by legislators. Betsy was nobody’s constituent in Pennsylvania, so why would they? Keibler and the original investigators cared deeply about the case, and still do, but the university and nearly everyone else, even her family, had moved on.10
Keibler and his wife, Beverly, were on a bus trip in 1989 when he heard on the radio that Ted Bundy was about to be executed in Florida’s electric chair. Trying to stave off the inevitable, Bundy was talking to investigators from around the country about girls he had killed and where he had buried their bodies. On the night before his execution, he was interviewed over the telephone by James Dobson, the conservative religious commentator from Colorado Springs who headed the group Focus on the Family. Dobson pushed Bundy to say that he had gotten into murder through pornography, and the condemned man was eager to oblige. He told Dobson that pornography put the Devil in his head, and that he had killed those young women because he read pornography. Keibler, a conservative man, liked Dobson and considered him a straight shooter. He thought the pornography admission strengthened his case against Bundy. But in the end, the interview didn’t change anything. On January 24, 1989, Bundy was put to death.11
The arguments against the idea that Ted Bundy killed Betsy Aardsma outweigh those in favor of the notion. Bundy preferred to strangle or bludgeon his victims to death, not stab them, although he would sometimes use knives to carve them up or behead them after death. “To go up to a girl and just stab her, that is so non-Bundyish,” psychologist Art Norman told reporter Ted Anthony of the Penn State Daily Collegian for a story about the twentieth anniversary of Betsy’s murder. “None of his needs would be fulfilled.” Norman, who was part of Bundy’s defense team and interviewed him extensively, cautioned, however, that Bundy could have broken from his pattern, especially early in his killing spree. And he did like to murder women on college campuses.
It hardly seemed possible that nearly twenty years had passed since Betsy was found on the floor of Pattee Library with a single stab wound in her heart, and equally hard to believe that her killer was still unknown, still free, and not serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. Esther Aardsma, Betsy’s mother, told reporter Phil Galewitz of the Harrisburg Patriot-News in 1988 that she hadn’t heard from the Pennsylvania State Police in more than a decade and had accepted that Betsy’s murder would likely go unsolved. A year later, she was quoted in Anthony’s Daily Collegian story, lamenting, “It’s such a cold trail, such a long time. I can’t imagine what they could do.” Once again, there was an Aardsma cold case officer. Corporal Jeff Watson, ironically the son-in-law of Corporal Mike Mutch, one of the original investigators, said there was “a good possibility this was a random act.” Like Mutch, he said Betsy’s sterling character made it hard to find a motive for her murder.
The Aardsma murder had rarely been mentioned in the Holland Evening Sentinel after the first year. Dick and Esther Aardsma did not place memorial tributes in the newspaper on the anniversary of Betsy’s death, as some in Holland do for a year or two after loved ones die. One of Betsy’s high school beaus, Luke Kliphuis, didn’t even find out about her death until the early 1980s, even though he lived in Holland. (They broke up well before high school graduation, and he had been in the army, stationed in West Germany, when it happened.) At some point in the early 1980s, he found out in the worst possible way. Kliphuis ran into Dick Aardsma, Betsy’s father, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, remembered him from years earlier, and asked how Betsy was doing.12
Chapter 35
A Life Destroyed
By the end of the 1980s, when he had passed his forty-fifth birthday, Rick Haefner’s regular companions were boys who ranged in age from preteen to late teen. Other than Chris Haefner, his cousin, they were often from struggling families, from broken homes. To them, Rick was cool, a source of money and good times. They worked in the rock shop, went with him on collecting trips, or just hung out.
Often the activities were innocent, even fun, but inevitably, for those he deemed ready, the bill came due. Rick would sit in the car with his arm around his favorite of the moment or disappear with him to his bedroom for an hour or two. Chris, who had rebuffed his groping hand in 1975, saw it all. But like the others, he kept quiet, not wanting the good times to end. In truth, Rick had so cowed the Lancaster authorities in the early 1980s with his aggressive lawsuits that even if one of these wayward boys had gone to the police, it seems unlikely the authorities would have rushed to intervene.
Perhaps Rick was less Charles Manson and more Fagin, the nineteenth-century fictional character in Oliver Twist (he was known as a kidsman) who schooled poor London boys in the ways of crime and shrugged if they were caught and hanged. In the end, it was all about his needs. Rick led his boys into a moral netherworld where there were only Rick’s rules and where the innocence of youth was merely a delight for him to pluck. How much the boys knew about his activities on the wrong side of the law is debatable, but they had to see him as an authority figure who got away with a lot. Several of them acquired extensive criminal records as adults. Some, as teenagers, even stole from him.1
One of the few women in his life was his mother, Ere Haefner, who had fiercely defended him and possibly covered up his involvement in Betsy Aardsma’s murder. After she died on June 2, 1991, whatever Rick did at home was now his business alone.
There was actually another woman, however, with whom he claimed to have “an intimate relationship.” His courting of Harriet Sandomer and the grooming of her son, Bruce, who was nine years old when they first met, seemed to come straight from Pedophile 101. A single welfare mother, Harriet was deformed by spina bifida. Attorney Kenneth W. Richmond, who represented Haefner at the time, described Harriet as somewhat overweight and practically bent in half from her condition. She also had a Valium dependency problem. Harriet had grown up a few blocks from Rick but was nine years younger. They would meet at a nearby coffee shop. Rick added Bruce to the crew of boys at the rock shop and gave Harriet between $100 and $150 a month toward her living expenses. In addition, Rick brought her food and took Bruce to places she could never afford to take him on her own. “Rick feels sorry for me,” Harriet told Richmond. “But he’s a bastard, too.” She did not elaborate.2
Haefner fooled few into believing that his relationship with Bruc
e was completely innocent. Jimmy Burkey certainly didn’t think so. He had referred derisively, in Haefner’s presence, to Rick’s “little pussy Bruce.” But it was not until after Ere’s death in June 1991 that a confrontation with the outside world began to gather steam. According to Haefner, Lancaster County Children and Youth Services, the county’s child welfare agency, began “slandering” him to his neighbors around that time, calling him a sexual pervert and dangerous. Of course, what is “slander” to a psychopathic pedophile may simply be an agency doing its job and inquiring whether neighbors had observed anything bad going on. Kevin Burkey even paid a visit to Harriet Sandomer to warn her about Haefner’s true nature and what had happened to him.3
Bruce, who had attention deficit disorder, struggled in school and received help from the Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit, known as IU 13. Intermediate units in Pennsylvania are regional public education entities that provide special education and other services to school districts in their territory. On December 3, 1991, Rick was summoned to the offices of IU 13 outside Lancaster and informed that Bruce, then twelve, was going to be arrested for aggravated assault, possibly against a girl student, although the details are incomplete. Bruce was a small boy, just five-foot-two and weighing a hundred pounds. Before he was read his Miranda rights by the police, a parent or adult guardian needed to be present. Rick was already well-known to the IU staff.4
