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

by David DeKok

  Yet despite all this, Wright, who was in his early seventies, continued to associate with his former student. Haefner didn’t know that Wright had gone to Hosler in 1976. At what point does Wright say, “Oh, well, I guess they aren’t going to do anything, so let’s just pretend nothing happened”? Or does it continue to fester in his soul? He and Troxel had been coming to Shoshone since the early 1950s. It was their town, not Rick’s. But it was also a very small town, and avoiding him would have been difficult if that is what Wright wanted to do.

  Perhaps Haefner did know something about Wright that the professor did not want to become public knowledge. Why else would someone keep a dreadful secret like that? That Wright used Dan Stephens as a confessor—someone whom he had not seen in years—suggests that he desperately needed to share his guilty secret with someone. Had the death of his wife in January 1990 made him more willing to risk talking about Haefner? But even then, more than twenty years after Betsy was murdered, Lauren Wright remained unwilling to go to the state police.

  Kathy Nixon, manager of the Tecopa Hot Springs County Park, knew Haefner as well as anyone toward the end of his life. He lived in a trailer in the campground for a time. She said the region is a geologist’s dream and that Rick seemed “genuinely happy” there and wanted to share what he had with others. His dream was to put in a geology study center devoted to Death Valley. Rick made his money, she believed, by conducting faceting classes—instruction in cutting stones—at the big rock and mineral shows in Tucson and Quartzite, Arizona. Two of Nixon’s sons accompanied Rick to the shows on two separate occasions. “They never had any issues with him,” she said, adding, “A mother would know.” But she did remember her sons saying that on both trips, Rick got them all kicked out of a restaurant after flying into a rage at the waitress. Did Nixon like him? “He was okay,” she said.3

  Nixon remembered Dudley, his aged, nearly blind cocker spaniel, and how he was nearly deaf, too. Because of that, he wore a blinking collar. Dudley died before Rick moved out of the county park, Nixon recalled. Bennie Troxel, Lauren Wright’s friend, also remembered Dudley, and so did Fred Bachhuber of Boulder City, Nevada, who was chairman of the Department of Geology at UNLV from 1997 to 2001, at the time Rick was trying to get a job there. He even brought Dudley with him once to a meeting at the school.4

  In a number of affidavits filed in his lawsuits that were active at the time, including one dated July 3, 1997, Haefner presented himself as a working geologist who was involved in ongoing research in Death Valley. In his own description, he was sought out by geology classes and other groups, “some from as far away as Germany,” some of whom regarded him as “the world’s leading expert on rhyolitic lava flows,” the subject of his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation. “I conduct my own research in Death Valley. Two collaborators, Dr. Lauren A. Wright and Bennie W. Troxel, retired geologists, also live in the area. We regularly do field work together.” This was verifiably true at least in the case of Troxel. He and Haefner cowrote a paper, “A Petrologic Paradox in Central Death Valley, California,” that was presented to the Geological Society of America at its annual meeting in 2002, a few weeks after Rick’s death. Lauren Wright is mentioned in the acknowledgments as having provided some basic data needed to complete the research.

  Bachhuber, who listened to Rick’s appeals to be hired as a lecturer at UNLV, and who was surprised when he brought Dudley to his office, considered him to be a rather strange person. “He wanted a formal relationship,” Bachhuber said. “He was willing to come in to give symposiums. He might have given one talk. But he was interested in things that didn’t fit our program. He was more a technician than a real geologist.” Told that Haefner claimed to have been supervising a geology graduate student, Bachhuber was dubious. “I rather doubt he was on anyone’s committee,” he said, referring to the university group that supervises a graduate student’s research work. “He would have to submit his résumé and be approved by the graduate college. I don’t think there was any attempt to get him certified.” But what perplexed Bachhuber the most was Haefner’s relationship with Wright and Troxel, “who had very, very good reputations. Why is he doing field work with those two? Things didn’t fit very well.”5

  Rick Haefner eventually sued UNLV, but not for failing to hire him as a geology lecturer. The lawsuit was for towing his car. He had asked Bachhuber if he could leave his “field car”—the car he drove out into Death Valley when he did his research—at his home from May to October 1999, when he would be in Pennsylvania. The department chairman said no. According to Haefner, the Geology Department then asked UNLV Parking Enforcement to issue Rick a parking permit for the summer, which they did. Because of a bureaucratic mistake, no renewal application was sent at the end of the summer, and his car was deemed abandoned. On September 12, 1999, it was towed and impounded by a private Las Vegas towing company. The lawsuit, which generated more than a hundred court filings of greater or lesser size, was dismissed after Haefner’s death in 2002.6

  As comical and ridiculous as Haefner’s court activities might seem—Bennie Troxel remembered telling Rick he should have been a lawyer, because he was always talking about suing people—we know by now that his lawsuits often hurt innocent people, either directly or as collateral damage. The last years of Haefner’s life were spent in litigation with Cliff and Marge Parmeter, an elderly couple from Henderson, Nevada. Their sin? They sued him after he defrauded them in a real estate transaction for a small house they owned in Tecopa Hot Springs. So, of course, he sued them right back. Their plucky lawyer, Dana Crom, was a woman, and that triggered all of Rick’s worst instincts and craziest behavior. If he was trying to show the world one last time what kind of a sociopath he was, he accomplished it with his treatment of the Parmeters and Crom.

  Rick began thinking about buying a house in California at the same time he started thinking about adopting Bruce, who had turned eighteen at the end of 1996. He heard that a house and lot were for sale in Tecopa, or technically Tecopa Hot Springs, a sort-of suburb of Tecopa. Located about six miles south of Shoshone, Tecopa Hot Springs is mainly trailer parks and a motel surrounding a natural hot springs where visitors can bathe. It is set in a dry, dusty, but starkly beautiful desert landscape where a few mesquite trees provided the only shade from the baking sun. You could reinvent yourself here. Paul Watkins, a one-time follower of Charles Manson (he was an active member of the Manson Family but had not been involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969), was Tecopa’s unofficial mayor until his death from cancer in 1990. In the distance are the mountains in Nevada where Las Vegas mobsters are said to have disposed of bodies. The great casino city of the desert is only seventy-seven miles away, but there is almost nothing in between unless you take the long way around, through Pahrump. The Parmeter house wasn’t anything fancy, and it needed some work, but it was clean and tidy and the price was reasonable. There was plenty of space on the lot to put a house trailer where Rick could stay while his new home was being renovated, and to use as a guesthouse later.7

  He met with Cliff and Marge Parmeter at their home in Henderson on March 12, 1997. Both Parmeters were in their early nineties and in poor health. Rick and the couple came to a verbal contract. They agreed to a discounted price of $42,500 and to do a seller-finance deal if Rick would make a down payment of $5,000 and then pay off the balance by December 15, 1997. At their age, they couldn’t wait forever for their money. The Parmeters put the oral agreement in writing when the deal closed on May 9, signing and notarizing it and mailing it to Rick. But their efforts to get him to sign proved fruitless. Every time they raised the issue, he would call and get them to reaffirm the oral terms and then not sign anything.8

  Things began badly. Rick was supposed to make the down payment in ten days, but he didn’t do so until late August. He told the Parmeters he hadn’t been able to pay on time because he supposedly had been the victim of an assault. Whether this actually happened cannot be verifie
d. In a letter to Rick of November 12, 1997, the Parmeters offered their sympathy. “It is a sin how some people have no respect for others,” they wrote. “Hope you recover with no aftereffects.” They told him to stop by their Nevada home to pick up the keys.9

  Rick didn’t pay off the balance by December 15. In early January 1998, around the time he beat up Catherine Schuyler, he renegotiated the deal with the Parmeters. Now he would pay interest of 11 percent—in effect, rent of approximately $400 per month—and pay the annual property tax on the house and land. He would make principal payments at least annually. In return, they let him take possession of the property, even giving him a letter of introduction that he could show to the neighbors when he moved in. But Rick’s promises this time were no better than the ones he had made before. He paid nothing at all until May 1998, when he sent them $3,000, then another thousand dollars the following month. Then nothing more. Not the property taxes, not the monthly interest payments, not anything. The Parmeters fumed at his betrayal.10

  On December 26, 1998, a telephone conversation occurred between Haefner, Cliff Parmeter, and Parmeter’s daughter, who was not named in Rick’s subsequent letter. She said the property was no longer for sale to him and called him a “con artist” They wanted him out. He took offense at being called a con artist and said in a subsequent letter that he would not be sending the Parmeters the $5,000 check he had planned to mail if the house was truly no longer for sale to him. Nor could he move his trailer and belongings from the property until he arrived from Pennsylvania toward the end of January. The call terminated when Cliff Parmeter began having chest pains.11

  The arrest of Bruce for armed robbery in State College on February 23,1999, and his sentencing later that spring to two to four years in state prison for the robbery and a string of other crimes, ended any possibility of him being adopted by Rick, if either still even wanted it by that point. Haefner claimed to have begun working with two adoption agencies around this time, seeking to adopt a boy somewhere else. Whether this was true or merely a ploy to gain sympathy from the Parmeters is impossible to say. In March 1999, Rick hired Kirk Livermont, a lawyer in Independence, California, the county seat of Inyo County, to formalize his purchase of the house and land. He may have talked the Parmeters down from the ledge with an offer of a $15,000 down payment, which is referenced in a letter Livermont sent to the Parmeters on March 29, 1999. Around the same time, Haefner hired a local contractor, Dan MacBrohn, to make repairs to the Parmeter house, which suggests he expected to be staying there for the long term.

  But on May 20, 1999, Livermont sent the couple a letter informing them that Rick could pay neither principal nor interest at that time, and he asked them to accept a promissory note. Cliff Parmeter angrily refused and sent the papers back to Livermont. There was no further correspondence until November, when Parmeter sent a bitter letter to the lawyer summarizing what he now viewed as a complete fraud. Moreover, he had just inspected his property, accompanied by an Inyo County sheriff’s deputy, and found it in deplorable condition, which greatly upset his wife. He told Livermont he planned to evict Rick from the house and land. But things could never be that simple. On January 7, 2000, Haefner won a temporary restraining order against the Parmeters, staying the eviction after arguing, among other things, that it would disrupt his plans for adopting a child and make it impossible for him to earn a living. Then, acting as his own attorney—Livermont had apparently resigned beause he wasn’t getting paid—he filed a lawsuit against the Parmeters. They in turn sought out a lawyer and hired Dana Crom of Bishop, California, who had just gone into private practice after working as a government lawyer, handling family and dependency law.12

  To Crom, it seemed like a straightforward case. Haefner didn’t own the property. He hadn’t paid the Parmeters, and now they wanted him out. She received a cold dose of reality at her first meeting with Rick after laying out in no-nonsense terms what he needed to do. This apparently triggered all of his resentments toward women. He began screaming at her and saying nasty things about the Parmeters. Nearly every time they met he would scream at her, to the point where, for the first time in her career, she requested a court officer be present at any meeting they had. “He would become enraged, absolutely enraged over the littlest of things,” Crom said. “It was ridiculous. It was a slam-dunk case: Either pay for it or give it back.” He wouldn’t do either. She had a great deal of sympathy for the Parmeters. “I know he scared my clients,” Crom said. “He was very threatening to them. He had written them very nasty letters. Anyone who read them would consider them threatening.”13

  Haefner conducted depositions of the Parmeters in Nevada, and they went off without a hitch. To make it cheaper and more convenient for Rick himself to give a deposition to her, Crom agreed to do it while she was in Philadelphia visiting her brother-in-law, who was a lawyer for Pepper Hamilton LLP in downtown Philadelphia. “It was he [Haefner] and I and the court reporter,” Crom said. “He wanted to talk settlement.” She completed her questioning and was escorting him out of the building at 2 Logan Square when he suddenly became enraged, in the same manner as before. “He was really agitated and upset,” she said. “It was so loud my brother-in-law and husband came running. I was looking at the receptionist during this and said, ‘Please call security.’ I wouldn’t respond to him. I was shaking like a leaf.” When Rick heard security being called, he ran out of the building. Crom thought it odd how Haefner could be so levelheaded for a period of time, then just explode.14

  The case dragged on into 2001. In April of that year, Crom filed a motion for summary judgment, and the judge said he would grant it. That forced Rick to settle. The terms were surprisingly favorable: He got to keep the property and paid a reduced price to the Parmeters. Unlike before, he did keep his word.

  How does a murderer die? How should he die? In Rick Haefner’s case, it began without drama. He and Bennie Troxel had been out on a long hike in mid-March 2002 in the area up behind Shoshone that Rick had named the Shoshone Volcanics. They were investigating a peculiar geologic formation, and Lauren Wright may have been with them. Bennie and Rick had collaborated on a paper that would be presented later that spring at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “I should have known something was going on,” Troxel said. “He tired out before me, and I was in my eighties.” Haefner was only fifty-eight years old. But nothing else happened during the hike.15

  Not long afterward, Rick was at, or near, home when he experienced chest pains and reached out to his neighbor, Kathy Nixon. He told her he thought he had indigestion, the first indication of so many heart attacks. He was taken by ambulance to Valley Hospital in Las Vegas. By the time he arrived, he indeed was having a heart attack, but the emergency room physicians stabilized him. He seemed to be getting better, Nixon said, and his brother George and George’s wife, Margaret, came to visit him at the hospital. But on March 19 around 5:08 a.m., he suffered complications and died. According to the information on his Nevada death certificate, the cause of death was ventricular rupture. Cardiologists say this means that the soft, immature scar tissue, which had begun to form on the front wall of Rick’s heart after the first heart attack, blew out like a bike tire from the pressure created by the heart, the blood pump, when it contracts. This happens in a small percentage of heart attack patients, typically during the critical third to fifth day after the initial attack. Even with immediate surgery, say cardiologists, ventricular rupture is very difficult to survive.

  Haefner died in the same way Betsy Aardsma had died—from blood pouring out of an injured heart into the chest cavity. What was different, of course, was how the injury had occurred. What had been done to Betsy with a knife had now been done to Rick by God.

  George had Rick’s body cremated; what became of the ashes is unknown. There is a bronze marker for Richard C. Haefner next to his parents in St. Anthony’s Catholic Cemetery in Lancaster, but Chris Haefner says the cremains aren’t there
.16

  Chapter 38

  The Road to Rick Haefner

  After Sergeant George Keibler retired in 1983, the Aardsma investigation became an orphan for a few years. Captain Vincent Fiorani, the commander of Troop G, saw no need to assign a new shepherd after fourteen years and rebuffed Keibler’s offer to train his replacement. After Fiorani left, the officers eventually given charge over the cold case didn’t approach it in the same way. For Keibler, it had been a personal crusade, a promise to keep to the Aardsma family. For his successors, it was just one assignment among many. Trooper Jeffrey Watson, who was the son-in-law of Corporal Mike Mutch, one of the original investigators, had the case for a time in the late 1980s, followed by Trooper Bill Madden, followed by Trooper Sally Brown, who had it on her desk until around 2005, when she retired and Trooper Kent Bernier took over. He had the case until 2009, when he was promoted to corporal and transferred and Trooper Leigh Barrows took over. Even as late as 2001, Brown told Keibler that she had never read the entire, voluminous case file, which was comprised of a 1,700-page main report and several boxes of other material, including Keibler’s card file. And it was all on paper, not in searchable digital form. There was no executive summary. Nor had any of the later investigators actually gone to Pattee Library to get the lay of the land until Bernier did so in the late 2000s.1

  We look back now and think, Why didn’t they go after Rick Haefner? But the exit onto that road had been obscured by the long silence of Professor Lauren Wright and aggravated by the failure of Penn State general counsel Delbert MacQuaide to do anything with Wright’s information in 1976, when the professor finally went to Charles Hosler, his dean, and broke his long silence. Keibler never heard any of that.