The Last Reason Betsy Aardsma was murdered in Pattee Library in 1969. Her killer was never apprehended. Few things are as torturous to a family as unresolved loss. The same goes for the writer that chooses to dust off a murder more than three decades old. by Sascha Skucek

Photo coursty of Pennsylvania State Police

On November 28, 1994, stacks supervisor Tom Whalen walked through the Pattee Library Level 2 core.1 If he didn’t before realize the significance of the date, he did shortly thereafter. A candle burned solemnly in an aisle of the core. Twenty-five-year-old newspaper clippings lay scattered, and someone had written on the floor with red marker: R.I.P Betsy Aardsma, born July 11, 1947, died November 28, 1969. The clippings all referred to the library murder that thrust Betsy Aardsma’s name and image into the public eye in 1969. By 1994, it had been years since police investigated the library for clues—years since they set up hidden cameras in the stacks2 in search for a killer. In light of the coldness of the case, perhaps the most troubling detail in Whalen’s 1994 discovery were the last two words in the message: I’m back.

News of Whalen’s finding was kept relatively quiet. Although the police were summoned, the lonely shrine and ominous message were soon forgotten. Then, in 1999, another message was found.

The pain is apparent everywhere I go. The sadness faded at the best but most unexpected moment. I walked carefully on a path through a grove of trees that led to a field. It was July 24, 2003, at about 11 p.m. in Holland, Michigan. I tried to arrive earlier, with some daylight so that I could do what I knew I must. A numbing despair and loneliness became more gripping the closer I went. I wanted to turn back and give up, but somewhere in Pilgrim Home Cemetery was an answer. I doubted I could find it, but still I would try. In the end, through the darkness, I found nothing but the distant glimmerings of a million white stars. It was enough to help me push on.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I stood outside my motel room, listening to the long, soothing sound of a train running somewhere in Holland. My stomach twisted as I thought about my only connection to this town.

Four years ago I called a Holland phone number listed to Richard and Esther Aardsma.
A woman answered. I explained nervously that I wanted to speak to her about her daughter. That I wanted to speak about her daughter’s life was enveloped by the looming shadow of her murder, and I couldn’t find the words.

“Oh….” she said. “…just a minute.” She paused.
“There’s a man on the phone who wants to talk about Betsy.”
I have never heard her called by her first name; it was always Aardsma or Betsy Aardsma, and hearing her name then, from her mother, chilled me.
“Hello,” a man answered roughly.
Words failed me again.
“I would appreciate it if you didn’t write [the story],” he said. “I mean, I can’t stop you, but we’d prefer that you don’t write anything about it at all.”
“I understand,” I said. “I’m sorry I’ve bothered you.” And I hung up.

The conversation left me depressed and conflicted. My investigation into the death of Betsy Aardsma had been rejected again—this time by family. My heart wanted to honor the request. But I couldn’t.
On July 25 I walked through the rows of tombstones and froze at the sight of her grave. The stone was unremarkable. Betsy Aardsma’s grave was decorated with a geranium, its buds dried up and dying. The stone’s edges were buried. I knelt down to wipe the dirt away and define the edges. I had wanted to bring flowers, but the cemetery’s rules were complex—besides, flowers were already here. I stood by her grave for a long time and thought. I didn’t know quite what to do or to offer, but I knew the trip to Michigan was necessary. For years I was aware of what I was fighting against. Now, I sought a connection to what I was fighting for. And with no real words, I sat in the grass and picked the dead buds from the potted flower, making way for it to bloom again.

It had been years since I had picked up my file on Betsy Aardsma. Life kept getting in the way. My December 1999 [State College Magazine, December 1999] story seemed incomplete—riddled with mistakes and uncertainties. But I started again—reread stories, checked notes, reviewed old files, created new files and listened to interview tapes.

Little was written about the victim in the past 34 years. What was written portrayed Betsy Aardsma as fun-loving, serious about her work, very intelligent, popular, pretty, a fine person, two notches short of a saint with dark hair and, falsely, as blue-eyed. Meaningful descriptions of the person were few.
“ She had an uninhibited laugh,” Betty Bechtel, a classmate of Aardsma, said in 1981. “She was bright but not a bookworm.”3

Bechtel then shared a beautiful memory.
“I remember we used to sit outside on the steps of Atherton, catching the last rays of fall,” Bechtel recalled. “Betsy liked to sit there and watch the squirrels and chipmunks running around.”
Professor Nicholas Joukovsky co-taught English 501—the class in which Bechtel and Aardsma enrolled. It was there that Aardsma made the most friends. Because of the class, Aardsma stayed on campus over Thanksgiving* to finish her research paper. It had also been for the class when Aardsma came to see Joukovsky on November 28 to discuss her project and a book she was going to get from Pattee. Harrison Meserole, principal instructor of English 501, was among the last to see her alive in his office on Level 1. A classmate heard Aardsma cry out* on Level 2 at 4:45 p.m. and was the first to find her lying in the stacks among fallen books—on her side with her foot propped against a bookshelf.4 It was another classmate that finally came by and rushed to get an ambulance.

Now, years later, Joukovsky helped me in my search to learn more. He thought deeply about the class and remembered a student named Linda Marsa, a friend of Betsy Aardsma.

I finally found Marsa’s name, listed on staff at the Los Angeles Times. On occasion, she still wrote a column in the health section. For months, my letter went unanswered. But that wasn’t unusual. Aardsma’s roommate, Sharon Brandt, had remained silent in my attempts to contact her, and Betty Bechtel also refused to speak about her friend.

I couldn’t summon the courage to contact Dr. David Wright, then Aardsma’s fiancé and now married with family and a successful practice. Wright caught police’s immediate attention following the murder. Within hours, Harrisburg police contacted him at Milton Hershey’s School of Medicine and told him that his fiancé had been killed. Shortly after, he may have realized he was a suspect. But he was cleared early in the investigation.

“ It was fairly easy for the police to determine that Dr. Wright was attending classes during the time of the murder,” Corporal Roger Smith, one of the current investigators, said in an interview recently. “A number of sources were interviewed to establish this as fact.”

In my search, I am the enemy. I am the writer who asks others to remember what they try to forget—all because I can’t surrender to this despicable hopelessness that is accepted by so many as the hard part of living. I am treated with suspicion and contempt for my view. I am accused of sensationalism—of tarnishing Betsy Aardsma’s life by exploiting her death. What they believe my profit could be, I don’t understand. I suppose the wish to make something right is too difficult to understand, especially coming from a stranger.

I’ve heard that a true friend is someone who will be there for you when they would rather be elsewhere. I’ve also heard that a friend is someone with whom you simply share common interests. My friends are of both varieties. My good friends let me go and don’t question why. They don’t understand why I push on but know I’ve made up my mind. Others feel they must understand or convince me to let it go. Why Betsy Aardsma? Why not any of a thousand other unsolved murders? What am I looking for?

And I don’t know what to say. How do I tell them that I’m not looking for anything—but that I’m looking for everything? It has become a dichotomy, in search of a truth that seems to contradict itself. The answer is there, I tell myself. If I just go to the pain. If I commit to the shattering, there is a way to absolution. No matter what I do, she will still have died—but I can end the despondency that the killer started.

I can’t believe you found me,” Linda Marsa says on the phone. I can’t believe you called me, I think.
Linda speaks warmly and fast. My letter had flooded her with memories.
“ I’m so glad I found you, Linda,” I say.

Here I am,” she says with a friendly hum. “You got me.”
Linda is quick and ready to tell me about her friend.

“ Betsy was amiable, bright…very friendly,” Linda says, “but she also had this kind of irreverent attitude—sort of an ironic detachment and a real sense of humor about everything that was going on.”
Finally, Betsy Aardsma was beginning to take form.

“ And she was very smart. She wasn’t one of those sweet goodie two-shoe types—she had an edge. When I think of her, I always think of this young Katherine Hepburn who had this crisp, Yankee kind of bearing.”

Linda had spent a great deal of time with Betsy Aardsma in their first months at Penn State. Aardsma had come from the University of Michigan, Marsa from the University of Buffalo. State College was a “cow town,” sluggish and seemingly oblivious to the dawn of the women’s movement, civil rights and the ongoing war in Vietnam. There was little to do but catch a movie, and few hangouts stayed open late.
“ Ye Old College Diner,” Linda says quickly and laughs. “We’d go there and have Stickeys. It was the only place open late.”

“And what about her hair?” I ask. “The news stories can’t seem make up their minds on the color.”
“She had reddish-brown hair. In the sun it looked red. It was kinda curly and she’d put it up in a twist and slap a beret on it.”

Aardsma was profound in her thinking. She had been accepted to the Peace Corps in Zaire, but gave it up for the chance to attend Penn State, close to her fiancé in Hershey. Shortly before Thanksgiving, she had accepted Wright’s marriage proposal and the announcement was to be made official over the Christmas holiday.3 Still, in a time when women began pushing towards more complicated careers, Aardsma couldn’t help but wonder about where she wanted to go.

“We both had strong, social consciences,” Linda recalls. “I always remember her saying, ‘Do I want a house in the suburbs and the keys to the Country Squire?’”

Even at her young age, Aardsma showed faith in her direction and firmness in her spirit. In her diary she once wrote, “Time has already run out on me, even before I start. It matters little how long the time really is. It just has to be used.”5

After her death, her family found a poem she had written in high school. It was read at her memorial service on December 3, 1969—a cold, cloudy day with an inch of fresh snow.6 The last stanza read:
I live for God.
I exist for a reason.
I am living in preparation for death.
What I live for will last,
And increase in the face of eternity.
Time is my friend.
Time is my beginning.7
Linda was devastated by her friend’s death. She fell into a deep depression and barely finished her classes. She didn’t graduate from Penn State and attributes her friend’s murder as a defining moment in the course of her life.

“I loved Betsy. She was my buddy,” Linda says. “Whoever killed her deprived me of a lifelong friend. But what I suffered was infinitesimal compared to what the family and David went through. There has to be some type of justice.”

Like most of the English 501 class in the fall of 1969, Linda stayed in State College. At 6 p.m. on November 28, 1969, she got a phone call from her friend and classmate Rob Steinburg. Linda and Aardsma had befriended him in English 501.

“ Linda…” Steinburg said.
“ What?” Linda asked, sensing his distress.
“ Something awful has happened…Betsy’s dead.”

Sharon Brandt and Aardsma had left their dorm room in Atherton and walked briskly to Pattee in a stinging cold. The weather was blustery and gray. At 4 p.m., they separated in the library. They talked about meeting at 7 for dinner—maybe to see a movie, although they hadn’t decided on Easy Rider at Cinema 1 or Take the Money and Run at the State Theater.5

In Pattee, at her student desk, Aardsma took off her winter coat and scarf, laying it neatly on the chair along with her notebook. She was wearing a white, cotton, turtleneck sweater underneath a sleeveless, red dress with wide lapels. She took the steps down to Meserole’s office, and they talked about where she might find sources for her research paper.

Shortly before 4:30, she did some digging in the large card catalogs on the library’s main floor. Then she entered the core and walked down the steps to Level 2. What happened next is less clear.

She was seen in the core by a few people. One witness saw a girl* talking to a man shortly before 4:45 p.m.8 Around the same time, assistant stacks supervisor Dean Brungart walked through the core, saw Aardsma in an aisle, and then saw two men skulking nearby.9 Brungart went to Level 3. A short while later, he heard books falling downstairs through a vent in the floor. An employee on the main floor heard a faint cry. She walked into the Level 3 core and looked around but saw nothing.10 A girl at a desk by the east entrance of Level 2 core was roused from her studies by the noise. It sounded like someone had tripped or knocked over a bookshelf and cried out in surprise.

Less than a minute later two men emerged from the core. One was a man in his early 20s with trim-cut brown hair, some six feet tall and about 185 lbs. He was wearing tan khakis and a light jacket.11
“ Somebody better help that girl,” he blurted out.

Another male witness nearby confirmed hearing those words and turned to see the men talking to the girl. She then stood up and followed them back into the core. If she ever got a good look at the second man, police never made it clear. At the fourth aisle, the two men pointed out Aardsma lying on the floor among scattered books and walked on, saying they would find help. They walked to the elevator of the core and up the stairs to Level 3. The witness was left alone. She recognized Betsy Aardsma from class. Some blood stained her sweater and she had lost bladder control. The girl thought Aardsma had suffered a seizure—maybe bit her tongue—and fainted.

But Betsy Aardsma was already dead. She had been stabbed directly in the heart with a single-edged, hilted knife, one inch wide, four inches long. The blade had been angled downward. Blood rushed into her lungs quickly—painlessly. Strength left her like the ebbing tide. She fell. The wound itself bled little, and her senses reeled—the electric lights hummed, and the dark, waxed floor felt hard and cool. Her awareness turned to surrender, and her hazel eyes12 closed. Her life slipped gracefully away—into what she had prepared herself for all along.

The library employee who heard the cry looked up as a man rushed out of the card catalog room. She thought he may have come from Level 3 as he hurried through the main entrance. She described him with wavy hair, maybe glasses.9

In the core, the girl cried for help. She couldn’t rouse Aardsma. She called out again and waited—maybe as long as 15 minutes.4 In that time five people walked past, refusing to get involved. Another girl finally rushed out for help. She reached Elsa Lisle, a library employee, at her desk with a phone. Elsa called for an ambulance at 5:01 p.m. and informed Ritenour Health Center that the situation involved a girl who had fainted.5

When two paramedics arrived, a small crowd had gathered at the scene. Many of them were never identified. A person was administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The driver of the ambulance thought he detected a pulse. They placed Aardsma on the stretcher and left the library by 5:08 p.m. By then, the sky had darkened as dusk settled in for a long, cold night.

Thirty-five minutes after Betsy Aardsma was found in the core, Dr. Elmer Reed declared her dead at Ritenour—the result of a stab wound. When police arrived at the murder scene, almost an hour had passed, and many students that were in Pattee at 4:45 p.m. were now gone.

Through the years, the list of investigators—involved both officially and indirectly—has grown. Aside from the dozens of officers first involved at the temporary headquarters in Boucke in the first months after the murder, the names of William Pelton, Daniel Brody, William Kimmel, George Keibler, Clifford Yorks and Jeff Watson are echoed in the history of the mystery. Today, Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Sally Brown leads the investigation, supported by Cpl. Smith.

“ I believe the killer’s name is in the case file,” Cpl. Smith said referring to the 2,000 page report of Aardsma’s murder, kept away from public eyes. “We continue to work to find the connection.”
“ We just had another lead a few weeks ago and we followed up on it,” Trooper Brown said recently. “The investigation is still active.”

Fingerprints gathered at the scene could help convict the killer. A suspect was never officially declared, but some individuals are more interesting than others. Some still live in the area.

One man committed this murder. Another may have helped. As many as two looked on. Two, maybe more, know the killer’s identity. The killer may be married. His wife may deny what she knows in her heart—that her husband knows something about what happened in 1969. The killer has family: an aunt, cousins, nephews, a sister maybe, or a brother. He may have children—a son or a daughter just entering college—maybe researching a paper right now in the stacks of a college library. Someone knows something about a friend…a relative, about an associate. Something that never quite clicked. There was always something strange you could never quite understand.

For all the speculation about the killer, a few things are certain. He sees his stigma in every mirror. He has carried the burden for 34 years. Today he cowers, afraid to accept responsibility, like a lone wolf never quite able to relate to the pack. We all know more than we realize. It is a dark thing I ask. Still I do. Will you help me? Not for vengeance, not for justice, retribution or spectacle. Just for grace. Just for the hope that grace radiates.

The case has become a matter of faith. An undated letter, apparently written to Dr. Elmer Reed, rests in the library archives. Part of it says, “If you keep digging long enough and have enough patience, something will come out.”

The shockwave of Aardsma’s death sent far-reaching ripples to thousands. Many have put their efforts into solving the case, public and private citizens alike. Psychics have given vivid images—details of emotions, clothes, parking tickets…even names—all little pieces that may connect a puzzle of investigated facts. The work of our predecessors has been passed on. With each detail, with patience, compassion and will, we break ground and move closer to the man who caused this despair. Betsy Aardsma lived for truth. She prepared for death. Her mother once said that her daughter got the most out of a short life.

“ She said to me that that was her problem,” Esther Aardsma said about her daughter in 1989. “Everything was interesting. She was interested in just about everything….”13
The purpose of her existence continues. For all the reasons, this is the last. It will be realized.
I can’t help but feel the pain and burden of those I ask to remember Betsy Aardsma. It leaves me ashamed that, perhaps, I have no business suffering through something in which I wasn’t directly involved. But I have to go to the pain. The answer is there. And while I know I must keep going, I tell Linda how hard it is—that sometimes, I feel alone in my wish to make this right.
“ Don’t change, Sascha,” Linda says. “Don’t lose your humanity. You’re playing an important role, and people don’t understand that all the time.”

She has no idea how much her words mean to me. I can’t fully understand why I keep trying. Aardsma’s death connects us all in the core of our souls—she represents the beauty of life and laughter, of creative thoughts and happiness. Her murder reminds us of the darkness. And sometimes, I would rather put my work behind me and leave Betsy. But she is my friend. Although I never met or spoke to her. We never lived in this world at the same time. – SCM

Note:
If you have any information regarding this case, please contact Trooper Sally Brown at sallbrown@state.pa.us or phone 814-355-7545 or Corporal Roger Smith at rogsmith@state.pa.us or 814-623-6133. You may also contact Sascha Skucek via e-mail at thesound@thefury.net or at editorial@statecollegemagazine.com.
1 Based on an interview with stacks assistant John Gibson, who heard the story from Whalen and library staff.
2 Based on interviews with Professor Nicholas Joukovsky in 1999 and 2003.
3 Boyer, David. “1969 Murder Goes Unsolved.” The Daily Collegian 18 May 1981
4 “No Prime Suspects Police Say.” Centre Daily Times 1 Dec. 1969
5 Quarteroni, Bob. “10 Years Later: Woman’s Death Still a Mystery.” Centre Daily Times 28 Nov. 1979
6 Weather. Holland Evening Sentinel 3 Dec. 1969
7 “Rights Held Here For Slain Coed.” Holland City News 4 Dec. 1969
8 “University Offers Large Reward In Murder Case.” Centre Daily Times 9 Mar. 1970
9 Lenio, Mike. “Murder Conjures Memories of Pattee Stabbing in 1969.” The Daily Collegian 11 Mar. 1987
10 According to the official case file information provided by Trooper Sally Brown.
11 “The Composite Drawing.” Centre Daily Times 10 Dec. 1969
12 The autopsy report
13 Anthony, Ted. “A Vexing Mystery.” The Daily Collegian 28 Nov. 1989

As published in April 2004 issus of State College Magazine.