by David DeKok
The other problem was that when the state police thought about anyone in connection with Betsy Aardsma’s murder, it was usually Larry Paul Maurer, who had been in the English 501 class with Betsy Aardsma and had lived in Atherton Hall. When stories about the twentieth anniversary of the Betsy Aardsma murder in 1989 reminded everyone that the crime had never been solved, it was Maurer they began looking at once again, not Rick Haefner, who was unknown to them beyond the brief interview conducted by Trooper Schleiden in 1969. Around 1989, the Pennsylvania State Police created the Criminal Investigative Assessment Unit (CIA), an attempt to formalize and improve their approach to cold cases. The CIA officer in a troop, as he or she became known, studied cold cases to see if they could be solved by using modern methods and technology, including DNA testing and psychological profiling.
In Troop G, the CIA officer was Trooper Roger Smith in Bedford, Pennsylvania, who began to read through the Betsy Aardsma case file around 1990 as one of his first assignments. He did not replace Trooper Sally Brown, who was still the investigator assigned to the case, although she felt increasingly marginalized. Smith was an extra set of eyes. His initial goal was to find references in the Aardsma file to a particular individual, who he hinted was Maurer. One of the original investigators, probably Trooper Tom Jones, by then deceased, had always been interested in Maurer. He and Trooper Tom Shelar were the ones who picked him up at his father’s farm near what is now Line Mountain High School in Mandata, Northumberland County, in January 1970, and drove him across the Susquehanna River to his polygraph examination at the state police barracks in Selinsgrove. Jones had always thought Maurer ought to be interviewed again. Smith’s job was to understand why.2
His task was daunting. There was the report itself, which was so long that no investigator since George Keibler had ever finished reading it. The case file was old enough to have a musty smell. Smith couldn’t imagine what he could get from the report that all the other investigators had missed over the years. But he discovered that facts and connections and interesting angles do get overlooked. “There’s a lot of different things you find when you look through the old cases,” he said. “Even though somebody’s looked at it twenty-five times before you did, I’ve always found something in there.” And he did.
He began writing down the names of anyone in the report who had a connection with Betsy Aardsma, no matter how small. They might have been fellow classmates or someone who went out for coffee with her. One of the names he wrote down was Rick Haefner, Smith recalled, although it didn’t lead to anything. He would try to figure out what had happened to them in the intervening years. Had they gotten in trouble? Were they arrested for other crimes? He found himself making voluminous notes. Frustration overwhelmed him at times. “You would be reading the pages and it would look like this is going to go somewhere, and it fizzles out. That’s over and over again, throughout the whole report.” Smith would find himself interested in someone on page 300, but by the time he got to page 600, he knew he had wasted his time. He never found any indication that the state police had ever been close to solving the Aardsma murder, even if some investigators disagreed. And he found nothing to warrant a new interview of Larry Paul Maurer.3
Some other troopers with an interest in the Aardsma case remained firmly in Camp Maurer. It was not hard to understand why. As already noted, he seemed to wear guiltiness on his sleeve, even though he passed a lie detector test. Afterward, he had abruptly quit Penn State and gone into the army, and from there into the supersecret National Security Agency, a part of the Department of Defense that conducts communications surveillance in the name of US national security. They tried to be more secret than even the Central Intelligence Agency. The joke was that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” Was it any surprise they could not put Maurer out of their thoughts?4
Tom Shelar spent the last thirteen years of his career working in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation for the Pennsylvania Attorney General in Harrisburg, beginning in 1989. He tried to interest his bosses in starting a grand jury investigation of Maurer, but to no avail. “I think they felt it was a dead horse,” he said.5 Shelar did place a notation, or “stop,” about Maurer in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database.6
In 1994, Maurer returned from an overseas posting for the National Security Agency and was due for the background examination required every five years to keep his top-secret clearance. Maurer’s background investigator would mainly look for questionable contacts with foreign nationals, but also for criminal activity. By chance, the NSA investigator assigned to do his background check was John Shambach, a retired investigator for the Pennsylvania State Police. He had not worked on the Aardsma case but knew some of the men who did. Shambach, who retired from the NSA in 1998, was not permitted to say exactly what Maurer’s NSA job was, commenting only that he “had assignments and worked with a group.” Shambach said Maurer did a couple of tours overseas. “He had just come back when I interviewed him,” he said.7
In conducting a routine check in the NCIC, he found the “stop” that Shelar had placed on Maurer. Shelar was an old friend, so he called him up. He told him about Maurer and the Aardsma investigation. Armed with that information, Shambach set out to see if he could get a confession from Maurer that he had killed Betsy Aardsma. Shambach had a reputation as a tough questioner. Three other NSA investigators observed the interview through a one-way mirror.
“He never did [directly deny] that he [had done] it,” Shambach said of Maurer, who has declined to be interviewed about the Aardsma case. “And I put that to him in different ways over the course of two interviews.” By the time of the second interview, Maurer had contacted an NSA lawyer and was not cooperating. What struck Shambach was that when he asked about Betsy Aardsma, Maurer would not look him in the eye. “And he sort of sloughed it off with a laugh,” he said. Instead of denying the crime, as most people would, Maurer would say, “Why would I kill her? What would I kill her for?” He was still toying with them, a quarter-century later. To which Shambach would reply, “She brushed you off, didn’t she? You were trying to hit on her, and she brushed you off.” He was hoping for an angry reaction, but Maurer only smirked, Shambach said.
Maurer had already passed a routine polygraph exam about his contacts with foreign nationals, but Shambach wanted to run a “criminal” polygraph on Maurer, in which he would be asked questions about possible criminal activities. His superiors refused. One supervisor asked, “What if he fails? What do we do then?” To Shambach, it was simple: You turn him over to the Pennsylvania State Police and let them take it from there. But he had reached a dead end.
Maurer has always been a problematic figure in the Aardsma investigation, generating thick clouds of smoke but no fire. He has never been arrested for anything connected to Betsy Aardsma, despite interest by the Pennsylvania State Police going back to December 1969. Maurer knew Haefner—they had briefly been roommates—and knew that Betsy would be at Pattee Library that afternoon, because everyone in English 501 would be there. Could he have mentioned that to Rick Haefner, upset as he had to be about Betsy’s intentions toward David L. Wright? There is no evidence that he did, nor any that he had advance knowledge that Rick planned to kill her. Maurer admitted to being nearby in the Core when the murder occurred but always denied that he participated. He did not match the description of the running man who emerged from the Core moments after Betsy’s body collapsed to the floor in a cascade of books, the one who said, “Somebody had better help that girl.” We come back again to the fact that he obviously enjoyed toying with the state police, giving them tantalizing hints that perhaps he was their man. It is little wonder that some in the state police found it impossible to give up on the idea that he indeed was the killer of Betsy Aardsma.
Oddly, by the mid-1990s, there seemed to be almost as much investigation of the Aardsma murder being conducted by state police retirees like Shelar and Shambaugh, and by citizen investigator Bill
Earley, as by the state police themselves. Maurer was a particular obsession of Earley’s, a 1969 Penn State graduate who stayed on to get a master’s degree in 1972. A resident of Philadelphia’s Main Line, he had been vice president of technology and marketing for the New York Stock Exchange and a sales manager for Xerox Corporation before heading off into financial consulting. But the Aardsma case was his passion, and he spent many hours and many dollars on his personal quest to learn who might have killed her. His intention was to write a book. Earley seemed convinced that Maurer was the killer, and that he had been aided and abetted by two Penn State friends who will remain nameless here. He worked closely with a number of the original investigators after they retired, particularly Mike Simmers, although they eventually had a falling-out. It was Earley who brought John Shambach and his interrogation of Maurer in 1994 to the attention of Roger Smith. The book never materialized, however. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2008 that it was unfinished, and that he had no plans to publish it. Nonetheless, Earley continued to telephone the original investigators to share his theories.8
As the investigation reached its thirtieth year, police were no closer to finding the killer than they had been in 1969, when Sergeant George Keibler returned early from his hunting trip to lead the investigation of the most brutal on-campus crime in Penn State’s history. Betsy Aardsma was not completely forgotten. She resided in the memories of the men who had been the original investigators and, it turned out, one of their children.
In 1999, Kim Simmers, the daughter of (now) Captain Mike Simmers, had completed her undergraduate degree at Penn State’s main campus. She was now working on her master’s degree in applied psychology at Penn State Harrisburg and needed an internship. She had discovered that clinical work was not to her liking, and when her father told her about a paid summer internship available with the state police in the Criminal Investigation Assessment unit, she took the position. After she had settled in, her supervisor asked what she wanted to work on, apart from the things she needed to do for her degree. The first thing that popped into her mind was the case she had heard so much about growing up: the unsolved Betsy Aardsma case.9
“That was one of the most amazing things, one of the most memorable stories that my dad had always told us. Being a young female and having to go into that library, knowing what happened—it just always kind of intrigued me,” she said. “But I’ll tell you, every time I did go into the stacks, into the Central Core, it was get in and get out. It was just kind of an intimidating place. It was very dark. Even if you didn’t know what happened, if I had to get a book for research that was really far deep in there, it was like, I really don’t need that book.”10
She told her supervisor at CIA that she would like to see if there was anything helpful she could glean from the thirty-year-old Aardsma case. He was surprised, but let her look at the most recent supplementals to the case file, if not the entire 1,700-page report. Her deeper immersion in the case came four years later after she was hired as an analyst for the CIA unit and began attending monthly meetings held to review cold cases. Troops from the western half of the state sent their CIA officers to a meeting in Punxsutawney, and those in the east to a meeting a week later in Harrisburg. Each month a CIA officer from a different troop would bring a cold case to the meeting, review the details, and talk about suspects, if there were any. The group then asked questions and perhaps would profile the suspect and suggest an approach to interviewing him or her.
The Aardsma case finally had its day in 2005. In advance of the meeting, Simmers was allowed to read the entire case file at her cubicle, not just in bits and pieces. “The coolest thing for me was reading those first couple of reports that were turned in by Trooper Simmers,” she said, referring to her father, who in 1969 had been her age, in his early twenties. But what struck her as an analyst was the lack of forensic evidence collected at the crime scene in Pattee Library, which, of course, had been due to the failings of the Campus Patrol and the library staff. Simmers remembers no particular buzz about the Aardsma case. By then, it was just one among many unsolved crimes from across the state.
On February 20, 2006, Trooper Smith submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Security Agency, seeking copies of records in its files pertaining to Maurer and the interviews conducted by Shambach in 1994 about Maurer’s possible involvement in the Aardsma murder. A month later, Smith received a letter from the National Security Agency informing him that a thorough search had been conducted, and that no relevant records had been found. A week later, Smith filed a FOIA appeal, laying out the reasons he believed the NSA had the documents he wanted. Six months later, on October 30, 2006, the NSA informed Smith that it did indeed have records relating to Maurer and the Betsy Aardsma case, but that he couldn’t see them. The reason? They were personnel files, and to the NSA, that would “clearly” infringe upon Maurer’s right to privacy. After Smith retired in January 2008, a new FOIA request was submitted, this time under the name of the state police commissioner, Jeffrey Miller. The new request was written to more precisely define what it was they needed from the NSA. Smith believes this FOIA request did yield at least some material about Maurer but doesn’t know what was released.11
There was also talk in 2007 and 2008 of asking the Centre County district attorney, Michael T. Madeira, to convene a grand jury to investigate the Aardsma case and to force Maurer to provide a blood sample for DNA testing. Simmers convened a meeting at his house that included citizen investigator Bill Earley; John Shambach, who flew up from his home in Florida; Roger Smith; and Dave Aiello, who succeeded Smith as CIA officer in Troop G. The grand jury idea was still active in the fall of 2008, when the author was working on his series about the Aardsma case for the Harrisburg Patriot-News that preceded his work on this book.
At the time, Sergeant George Keibler declined to be interviewed for the stories. Later, he changed his mind, and he began the first interview on January 4, 2011, by explaining that his refusal to be interviewed in 2008 was because Trooper Kent Bernier, then the Aardsma cold case officer, had told him that Madeira was going to take the Aardsma case to a grand jury. He told Keibler that he wasn’t telling him not to be interviewed, “but we’d sort of like you to just cool it.”
Corporal Roger Smith said he met with Madeira late in 2007, just before he retired, to talk about getting a body search warrant in Maryland, where Maurer resides. Bernier confirmed the talks with Madeira but said the grand jury idea died because “you need some evidence and/or a suspect. I had neither—or at least, not enough at that time.” Once again, the state police had rushed to Camp Maurer only to find the smoldering remains of nothing.12
In 1986, Pamela West, a novelist then living in State College, became interested in writing a nonfiction book about the unsolved Betsy Aardsma murder and approached Sergeant Keibler, by then two years retired, for an interview. Keibler agreed, but says he first made West promise not to contact the Aardsma family. During her research, she was told by a young professor, whose name she does not remember, that on the night of the murder, a “geography” graduate student had shown up at the home of his professor and inquired breathlessly whether he had heard about a girl being murdered in Pattee Library. Poking into it further, West learned that the student’s name was Rick Haefner, that he was actually a geology graduate student, and that the professor was Lauren A. Wright. But at the time, it was little more than rumor. She eventually gave up the idea of a nonfiction book because she could not prove her suspicions and feared getting sued. Instead, she wrote a science-fiction novel, 20/20 Vision, about a police archivist who sends a clue back in time to a detective to help solve the mysterious stabbing death of a beautiful college girl in the music building of her university. Parts of it read exactly like the Aardsma case, while other parts are, well, science fiction. It was published in 1990, and is out of print, but can be acquired from online used book dealers.13
West came to the attention of
Sascha Skucek, an adjunct lecturer in the Penn State English Department at the main campus, who had written five articles about the Aardsma case for State College magazine between 1999 and 2010. He and his associate, Derek Sherwood, extensively researched the original murder, although they never had access to Keibler. West told them about Haefner, and they set out to learn more. Sometime in 2009, Sherwood placed a notice on the Internet that he and Skucek were looking for anyone in Lancaster who had known Richard C. Haefner.14
Chris Haefner, Rick’s younger cousin, was forty-nine in 2009. He was a supervisor at the M&M Mars candy plant in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and in his spare time was a novelist, writing books based on his life and adventures with Rick. His favorite, The Silver Mine, about his adventures exploring the old silver mine near Pequea that Rick had first showed him in 1973, was published in 2009. In January 2010, Chris was surfing the Internet, looking for information about Rick, when up came “Reward: Offer for Information about Richard C. Haefner from Lancaster.” Chris thought it must be a joke. Why would anyone offer a reward for information about Rick? Out of curiosity, he e-mailed Sherwood, who told him about the murder of Betsy Aardsma and how they suspected Rick might have been involved. It was the first time he had been able to put a name to some disturbing old memories.15
Reeling, Chris did more searching online and found a story about Betsy that someone had put on Myspace, the social media website. He also found an Internet page where Rick was profiled in the way someone might profile the Zodiac Killer. He stayed at it for several days, and everything he had suppressed for so long began coming back: the angry words in the alley between Ere and Rick, Rick’s attempt in the goethite field to justify Betsy’s killing, and all the bad things his cousin had done to him and the other boys.
