AARDSMA GDM 111208 22356

The stacks area of Penn State University Pattee/Paterno Library, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008, in State College.

(GARY DWIGHT MILLER/The Patriot-News)

To mark the 45th anniversary of Betsy Aardsma's infamous, unsolved murder, we are re-printing this article from David DeKok, originally published in 2008.

DeKok is the author of "Murder in the Stacks: Betsy Aardsma, Penn State University, and the Killer Who Got Away," detailing the 1969 mystery. Here is a Q&A with DeKok that we held earlier this year as his book was released.

Unsolved mysteries: What happened to Ray Gricar, Cindy Song, Tracy Kroh and others?

Read DeKok's full story below.

BY DAVID DeKOK, The Patriot-News

They are old men now, long retired from the state police, but they can't forget a slaying they never solved. They are haunted by the memory of Betsy Aardsma, a woman from Holland, Mich., who on Nov. 28, 1969, lay dead before them on a gurney in a hallway of Ritenour Student Health Center at Penn State University.

"When I retired from the state police, I went to Arizona, but I never let it go," said Ron Tyger, 69, one of the original investigators.

See David DeKok's video on the mystery of Betsy Aardsma.

Aardsma was stabbed once in the chest while doing research in the cramped and dimly lit stacks of Pattee Library. As she slumped to the floor, pulling books down on top of herself, her killer pulled out the knife and fled into the night.

Between 30 and 40 state troopers worked on the case, interviewing hundreds of students and following leads around the country, especially to Michigan.

Nothing came of their efforts. And it disturbs them.

"I know these guys want me to solve this," said Trooper Kent Bernier, the current investigator, who at age 40 was born the year before the killing. "They talk to me about it regularly.

"It means a lot to them because it was a case that hit them square in the face back then. And it's never going to let me go, either," Bernier said.

Betsy Aardsma's friends and teachers said she was among the best America had to offer in the late 1960s.

Artistic and poetic, imbued with liberal ideals and empathy for the underprivileged, she planned to join the Peace Corps after graduating with honors from the University of Michigan in 1969.

But her boyfriend, David L. Wright, wouldn't promise to wait for her, so she dropped those plans and followed him to central Pennsylvania.

Wright began classes at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, while Aardsma enrolled in the graduate English program at Penn State's main campus, taking the bus to Harrisburg on weekends.

She perished in one of the bloodier years of the 1960s, when the Manson family and the Zodiac killer were attacking in California and an unknown serial killer was murdering women around the University of Michigan.

Aardsma's family were relieved she was leaving Ann Arbor. They thought State College would be safe.

Instead, they were about to enter a nightmare that has lasted four decades.

Bright and popular

Betsy Aardsma was like many other women in small towns across America when she came of age in the mid-1960s.

Intrigued by the larger world, wanting a life of the mind and a life of helping others, she was unsure about being a traditional wife and mother.

Her hometown was founded by Calvinist religious dissidents from the Netherlands in 1847 and was known for being conservative and insular. As the local saying went, "if you're not Dutch, you're not much." It was half joke, half belief.

In the 1960s, Holland had about 25,000 people, predominantly descendants of those original settlers and many, like the Aardsmas, having Dutch names.

The city has two dominant religious denominations, the moderate Reformed Church and the ultraconservative Christian Reformed Church. Both believe God's will determines every event in life, good or bad. Humans are "predestined" at birth for heaven or hell.

Betsy Aardsma's pastor at Trinity Reformed Church told mourners at her funeral that her killing was "God's will," according to one of her friends who was there.

Richard and Esther Aardsma, Betsy's parents, were graduates of Hope College, a Reformed Church liberal arts college in Holland. He worked as a sales tax auditor for the Michigan Treasury Department, and she was a homemaker and former teacher.

The Aardsmas were a solidly middle-class couple, raising their four children in a house on leafy West 37th Street in Holland. Betsy was the second-oldest.

Betsy thrived at Holland High School, leading her class as a sophomore and eventually graduating fifth as a senior. Art, English, and biology were her favorites. Sometimes she planned to become a physician, other times a medical illustrator.

Judith Jahns Aycock recalled that Aardsma loved the colorful English literature teacher Olin Van Lare, who was prone to bursting into tears during moving passages of poetry.

Teachers loved her in return. Verne C. Kupelian, a history teacher who later opened a teen dance club in Holland patronized by Aardsma and her friends, still cherishes a poem she wrote for him.

Dirk Bloemendaal Sr., who taught physiology, a senior-level biology course, recalled that Aardsma was a hard worker in a difficult class, where all students dissected cats.

"I think I ended up giving her a straight 'A' in the class, and it was not an easy class," he said. "She was really the kind of person you love to have in your class."

Aardsma hung out with a group of girls whose names appear in academic honors stories in the Sentinel from junior high through National Honor Society and graduation.

Her best friend was Jan Sasamoto Brandt, a Japanese-American girl whose parents had relocated to Holland from the West Coast during World War II, when many fellow Japanese-Americans on the coast were being interned in camps.

"She was artistic, and I was bright also. But I was more the serious bright and she was more artistic, so I think we balanced each other pretty well," Brandt said.

Aardsma had long reddish-brown hair and hazel eyes. She was 5 feet 8 inches tall, and slim. She was never short of male admirers, friends recalled, but she wasn't boy-crazy and never stayed with one for long.

Aardsma also had a dark side, sometimes seeming to foresee that her life would be unaccountably short.

A poem she wrote as a high school sophomore, "Why Do I Live?" was cited by her pastor at her funeral as evidence that she accepted God's will and embraced death.

'Kind of gutsy'

At some point in late high school or early college, Betsy Aardsma spent a week on a mission program run by the Reformed Church on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico and taught art to what were then called "ghetto" children in nearby Grand Rapids.

That is known from published reports after her death and confirmed by her former brother-in-law Dennis Wegner.

None of her immediate family would agree to interviews for this story. Her sister Carole, now a Reformed Church minister, commented only that, "I've said all I'm going to say." Her younger sister could not be reached.

But friends, teachers and more distant family members like Wegner opened up. Their recollections, along with information already in the public record, enabled this story to be written in detail.

Aardsma entered Hope College in the Honors Program in the fall of 1965, intending to pursue the pre-med program, which has always been one of Hope's strengths.

She would have preferred to start college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, according to Brandt, who spent all four years there. They even talked about rooming together.

But her family was a Hope College family -- in addition to her parents, her older sister, Carole, was a graduate, and her brother would eventually go. Betsy Aardsma finally agreed to go, too.

"When we came to Hope College, it was really strict," said Tamara Lockwood Quinn, who like Aardsma lived in Voorhees Hall. "Lights out at 9 o'clock, chapel three times a week."

Aardsma's freshman roommate was Linda DenBesten Jones of South Holland, Ill., who recalled her as friendly, accommodating to a fault, fascinating to talk to and perhaps an early feminist.

"She wanted to be a doctor. I think that's pretty feminist," Jones said. "I thought it was kind of gutsy to say you were going to be a doctor. I didn't know anybody else who was going to be a doctor. In the classes she was in, she was one of the few women in it."

Men found Aardsma intriguing, among them fellow Hope student George Arwady, the current publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper in New Jersey. He recalled being in an honors English class with her and dating her once, but he remembered little else about her.

Aardsma could hold her own in a conversation about just about anything.

"She was always into really deep things and then was just so creative," Margo Hakken Zeedyk said. "She had a real good sense of humor, but at the same time, it was a little dry. Real clever."

But not all her dates were as friendly as Arwady. Jones recalled one date that her mother told the state police about after Aardsma was killed, someone "who had kind of snarled at her one time in the dorm," Jones said. "I remember it. [Betsy] saw that as very sinister and scary. At the time, I thought, oh, come on, he's just kind of dramatic."

Aardsma did OK in pre-med classes, Jones recalled, but decided during that first year that her English classes were far more enjoyable than biology or chemistry.

After her sophomore year, for what her friends believe were academic and social reasons, Aardsma transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Putting dreams aside

When she arrived at Michigan in the fall of 1967, the campus was engulfed in the fervor of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The school had been known for its liberal politics through much of the decade. Students for a Democratic Society was organized there in 1960, and Michigan student Bill Ayers, who became a household name during the 2008 presidential campaign, was a leader of the group that fall.

Aardsma was more drawn to another organization that had a special connection to the University of Michigan, the Peace Corps.

President John F. Kennedy first talked about sending Americans to Third World countries to help fight poverty during an impromptu speech on the Michigan campus in 1960.

Aardsma would see in the Peace Corps a way to live out her desire to help the world's less fortunate.

She found herself somewhat lonely, however, when she first moved to Ann Arbor.

Even though her friend Jan Sasamoto Brandt was there, Brandt was in a sorority, and the two had started to drift apart during the two-year separation. Aardsma missed her Holland friends but kept in touch through the mail.

"Intellectually, this place is not as alive as it should be," she complained in a letter in September 1967 to high school friend Phyllis "Peggy" Wich Vandenberg, who was at Marquette University in Wisconsin. "I run into asses every day."

But she also encountered "a good number of acutely aware people" and was happy that no matter the type of person, U of M had a lot of them.

In her senior year, she shared an apartment with three other women. It was below an apartment shared by four members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

One of them was David L. Wright, a son of a psychiatrist from Elmhurst, Ill. Wright, a senior, was pre-med. They had met as juniors, but now their friends pushed the relationship.

"She was just a very brilliant person, extremely smart," said Wright, now a kidney specialist in Rockford, Ill. "Good sense of humor. Just a wonderful person."

As happy as Betsy Aardsma was that final spring in Ann Arbor, she was among many women on campus worried by slayings taking place around them.

Serial killer John Norman Collins, now serving a life term at a prison in Michigan, had resumed killing women in March 1969. Police believe he killed at least four women between March and July 1969.

He was tried and convicted in the summer of 1970 for the last murder, that of Karen Sue Beineman of Grand Rapids.

Meanwhile, Aardsma's boyfriend, Wright, became one of 64 people accepted into the third class at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, which had opened in the fall of 1967.

Aardsma graduated from Michigan with "distinction and honors" in English. But as much as she cared for Wright, she still wanted to join the Peace Corps and go to Africa for a year. She applied and was accepted, according to Wright and Brandt.

It made for an unhappy summer in Holland.

Aardsma initially told Brandt she wouldn't be able to be in her wedding that August because she expected to be shipped off to Africa by then.

That was before Wright decided he wasn't crazy about the idea of his girlfriend going away for a year.

"She asked if I would wait for her and so forth," Wright said. "And I sort of selfishly said, I just don't know what will happen."

Aardsma canceled her Peace Corps plans and decided to follow Wright to Pennsylvania. She enrolled at Penn State, although the graduate English program was at the main campus in State College, nearly a hundred miles from his med school in Hershey.

She put her dreams aside and focused on a career as a teacher -- albeit at the college level -- like her sister Carole and her mother.

Because of the ongoing killings, her family was relieved she was getting out of Ann Arbor.

"When she moved to Penn State, we thought, oh, thank God, she's at a place where she's safe, not out at the University of Michigan," said Wegner, her former brother-in-law.

Premonition of early death

Penn State's main campus in State College was not entirely tranquil in the fall of 1969.

Since the winter of 1967-68, Penn State had seen protests by black students at the school. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, brought matters to a head. About five weeks later, black students took over Old Main.

"I was held prisoner for a half-day," said Charles L. Lewis, a retired Penn State vice president for student services. "They were trying to get attention and held me in a room with a half-dozen of us. Let me out in about four hours."

Students had a list of demands, including raising black enrollment at the main campus to 400 -- out of 26,000 students -- the following fall. They wanted more black professors, graduate students, athletes and coaches.

Meanwhile, Wright and other students at the med school in Hershey, which was still under construction, found themselves living in some of the red brick cottages on the Milton Hershey School campus.

Classes and labs were held in the new, crescent-shaped building that is still the heart of the medical center, which began admitting patients in the fall of 1970.

Aardsma lived with her roommate Sharon Brandt (no relation to Jan Sasamoto Brandt) in Atherton Hall, home of many graduate students on the main Penn State campus. Long-distance telephone calls were still expensive in 1969, so she wrote Wright a letter every day. The last one arrived the morning after her death.

The class that would figure in Aardsma's death was English 501 with professor Harrison Meserole, described as "brilliant, a former concert pianist" by John Swinton, who was a student there in 1969.

Students in Meserole's class learned how to ferret out mysteries that scholars solve, said Swinton, who later joined the English faculty. It was an introduction to research.

"His course was really tough and required an awful lot of library work," he said, "and sometimes a lot of digging in the library. A lot of work in the Rare Books Room, a lot of photocopy perusal."

Aardsma made new friends at Penn State, among them Linda Marsa, another English graduate student.

"She always seemed like a young Katharine Hepburn," Marsa said of Aardsma. "You know, with those kind of angular features and this curly, reddish hair that she pinned up. Lean and lanky with that same kind of sarcastic, funny, witty attitude."

Aardsma spent only eight weeks at Penn State, from her arrival in late September until her death on Nov. 28, but she managed to make an impression.

A friend, never identified, told The Associated Press after her death that Aardsma loved black literature, especially the works of James Baldwin. An unidentified professor quoted in the same story said she had "the deep sensitivity of an artist for others' feelings."

Marsa, who called herself a political radical, said she and Aardsma were as one in their opposition to the Vietnam War.

Wegner said in a 1972 news article that Aardsma led a campus discussion group against the war on national Vietnam Moratorium Day, which was Oct. 15, 1969.

Aardsma saw her boyfriend on weekends, taking the bus from State College to Harrisburg and back if he didn't drive up. Wright recalled that about midway through the semester, or about the end of October, she seemed troubled.

Aardsma told him she wanted to move to Harrisburg and enroll in courses there, probably at Penn State Harrisburg.

"In retrospect, when I thought about that, I wondered if she was worried about something up there," Wright said. "My wife's theory is that she just wanted to move things along and be closer."

But according to Wegner, Betsy had previously expressed a premonition of early death in her writings. Around that time, he said, she told her mother, "I don't know why I'm here. I have this weird feeling about being here."

'A certain ambivalence'

Wright said he and Aardsma were never formally engaged, but he probably would have given her a ring that Christmas with a wedding to follow in the summer of 1970.

So at the time of their last visit on Nov. 26-27, 1969, it would have been impossible for her to "break off the engagement." That Aardsma might have angered Wright by doing so has been one of several long-standing rumors in the case, even though the state police accepted the doctor's alibi after intensive interrogation.

Phyllis Wich Vandenberg recalled nothing in the letters she and Aardsma continued to exchange that fall to suggest a break-up was imminent. Dr. Steven Margles, a fellow medical student who lived in the same house as Wright, saw no evidence of trouble in the relationship.

A bigger question, perhaps, is whether Aardsma was eager to get married and become a doctor's wife, which at the time carried a job description that didn't involve an independent career.

There was a Hershey Medical Student Wives Club, at that time. It is mentioned periodically in 1968-69 copies of the medical college's Vital Signs newsletter now in the files of the Derry Twp. Historical Society.

One of the club's stated purposes: "To prepare [members] for their role as physicians' wives."

Aardsma's friend Marsa remembered her asking: "Is this what I want? Do I want the kids and the keys to the Country Squire?" A Country Squire was a Ford station wagon and a symbol of traditional 1960s family life.

Marsa said Aardsma loved Wright and went to visit him often, "but she had a certain ambivalence that I think was very natural."

Aardsma, Wright and perhaps a half-dozen other medical students, male and female, got together for Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 27 at the house where the handful of female medical students resided. The women cooked, and it was "a real nice time," Wright said.

During that day, Aardsma called her family in Holland to wish them a happy Thanksgiving. Wegner, who with his then wife, Carole Aardsma, was visiting from Madison, Wis., said everyone got on the phone with her.

Wright said he and Aardsma talked about her staying in Hershey for the weekend, but that he simply had too much studying to do for finals. And she needed to do research in the library for her English 501 paper -- due in less than two weeks -- for Meserole.

That night, Wright drove her to the bus depot in Harrisburg, in the 400 block of Market Street. It was the last time he saw her alive.

"And I always wonder if she had stayed down that weekend what would have happened," Wright said, calling it one of his biggest regrets.

The sound of falling books

-- Dr. Steven Margles, friend of David Wright

-- State police Trooper Kent Bernier

There is much about the stabbing death of Betsy Aardsma that remains a mystery, which is one reason state police and journalists find the case compelling.

Aardsma and her roommate, Sharon Brandt, left Atherton Hall about 10 minutes before 4 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 28, intending to do work at Pattee Library, the main library at Penn State.

Aardsma was wearing a sleeveless red dress over a white cotton turtleneck sweater, which led to speculation she was going to the library to meet someone.

"I didn't know she was wearing that," said Linda Marsa. "That would have definitely been out of character for Betsy. She was pretty casual, if not necessarily hip in the way she dressed. A dress and white cotton shirt on a cold November day to do research in the stacks? That's not normal."

According to Penn State English professor Sasha Skucek, who has researched the Aardsma case for years, they made a brief stop in Burrowes Hall to talk to professor Nicholas Joukovsky, who taught the English 501 class with Meserole.

Then Aardsma and Brandt walked to Pattee Library and parted company.

Aardsma headed for Meserole's office in the basement of Pattee Library. He was the chief bibliographer for PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, and needed to be near the books.

"We had a steady stream of students coming in that afternoon to talk about their research projects," said Priscilla Letterman Meserole, then the professor's secretary and later his wife. Harrison Meserole is dead.

"She had on a red dress," Meserole said. "I remember I complimented her on her dress."

Then Aardsma headed down a narrow staircase into the cramped, dimly lit stacks, the seemingly endless rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves where the books are kept.

Few students -- the police estimate is about 90 -- were in the library on the day after Thanksgiving. Normally, there would have been hundreds.

"There wasn't any kind of real security in the building because it wasn't considered to be necessary," said Wayne Baumgardner, a librarian. "Once [the Aardsma slaying] happened, the university put in major security regulations and things and really tightened up."

Aardsma was on level 2 of what is known as the core area, and after checking in the card catalog walked to rows 50 and 51 to retrieve a book she needed for her research project. The time was between 4:30 and 4:45 p.m.

One of the last people to see her alive was Dean Brungart, an assistant stacks supervisor at Pattee.

He told the Daily Collegian in 1987 that it was close to quitting time when he went to level 2 to get a book. Brungart saw two men chatting near the west end of the core and then passed Aardsma, who was between rows 50 and 51.

The space between the rows is narrow, not large enough for two people to pass unless one turns sideways. At the time, the shelving units extended to the wall, making it impossible to escape if cornered.

Aardsma's killer approached, carrying a hunting-style knife with a one-edged blade 3½ to 4 inches long, according to the autopsy report. There was no scream, no apparent effort to ward off the blade. Aardsma's hands had no wounds.

The killer plunged the blade through her breastbone -- which doctors said requires real strength and force -- and deep into her chest, severing the pulmonary artery and hitting the heart.

"The findings also suggest that the wound was inflicted with considerable force at the time of a face-to-face confrontation of the victim and the assailant, and that this weapon was held in the right hand of the assailant," Centre County pathologist Dr. Thomas Magnani wrote in his autopsy report.

It was a perfect killing blow, investigators later said. Most state troopers involved in the investigation, however, believe the killer grabbed her from behind before plunging the knife into her chest. It remains unresolved.

The severe internal wound bled almost completely into her lungs. Aardsma's red dress camouflaged the tiny amount of blood that leaked to the outside.

There was no "pool of blood" as later reported in news accounts. She was not sexually assaulted.

The killer pulled out the knife and walked away. Aardsma slumped to the floor of the library, pulling books down on herself as she fell. Magnani estimated she died in about five minutes.

A level above, Brungart heard the sound of falling books through a floor vent, he told the Daily Collegian, but he did not go to investigate.

Perhaps nine people were within 70 feet of Aardsma when she was stabbed, but none, because of the intervening shelves of books, saw anything. Skucek said some of them reported hearing a noise, more a gasp than a scream.

Mary Erdley, a student who knew Aardsma, rose from her desk and walked around the corner. She encountered two men, one of whom said, "Somebody better help that girl." They led her back toward rows 50 and 51 and then vanished.

Erdley had no clue what had happened to Aardsma. She stayed by her side, and over the next 15 to 20 minutes tried to get passing students to help her before anyone would stop, the Centre Daily Times of State College reported Dec. 1, 1969.

A library employee phoned Ritenour Student Health Center, which was a few hundred yards from Pattee Library.

An ambulance arrived after 5 p.m. By this time, as many as seven people were at the scene, milling about and touching things, according to Bernier, the current investigator. Another librarian was giving Aardsma mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

They still didn't know she had been stabbed. The ambulance attendants assumed Aardsma was still alive and had suffered an epileptic seizure. They took her to Ritenour, where she was pronounced dead at 5:50 p.m.

'In a daze'

Wegner recalled that the news came as the Aardsmas were finishing supper at their home in Holland that Friday evening.

The Rev. Gordon Van Oostenburg, their pastor at Trinity Reformed Church, came to the front door. He walked in, "with this awful look on his face," Wegner said, "and he told us Betsy was dead."

Ron Cotts, Betsy Aardsma's first cousin, remembered his parents, Louis and Ruth Cotts, receiving a "horrible phone call" about her killing at their home in Michigan City, Ind. The younger Cotts was a Delta Airlines pilot who owned a small plane and was visiting for the holiday.

On Saturday morning, he flew his parents to Holland, picked up Richard and Esther Aardsma, and flew them all to Chicago, a flight of about 200 miles, to catch a plane to State College to bring Betsy's body home.

"Esther and Dick were absolutely silent from Holland, Mich., all the way to Chicago O'Hare," he said. "Almost didn't say a word."

Phyllis Wich Vandenberg, who was living in Washington, D.C., heard the news from her father on Friday night.

While working as a waitress Sunday morning in a restaurant in the DuPont Plaza Hotel, she was horrified to see her first customer of the day looking at a story, "Coed is Murdered In College Library," about her friend's killing on Page 3 of the New York Daily News.

"He was reading it, and on that page ... is a full, huge picture of Betsy!" she said. "I was just stunned. I don't know what would have happened if my dad hadn't called me."

Verne Kupelian, Aardsma's former teacher at Holland High, was living in Columbus, Ohio, and heard the news on Paul Harvey, then a ubiquitous presence on American radio.

"And it shook me," Kupelian recalled. "I called up to Holland to one of the kids, and they confirmed it. I still don't understand it."

The violence of 1969 was underscored two days later by the arrest of the Manson family in California in the Tate-LaBianca murders, which knocked Betsy Aardsma's murder from the headlines in some newspapers.

Her funeral was held Dec. 3, at Trinity Reformed Church in Holland.

David Wright said he thought about not attending the funeral because it was so close to finals, but his family convinced him that he had to go. He sent a dozen roses to the funeral, one of which was placed in Betsy's hands in the coffin.

"But that's pretty much the only thing I remember," he said. "I was sort of in a daze."

And he was upset that the state police seemed to think he might be the killer.

How you can help: Anyone with information that might help state police solve the Betsy Aardsma killing can call Trooper Kent Bernier at 814-355-7545 or e-mail him at kbernier@state.pa.us.

Part Two of the 2008 series: The investigation