When David DeKok was 16, he woke up one day to find a picture of a murdered woman from his hometown staring at him from the front page of the newspaper on his porch.
A gentle smile, soft features, curling brunette locks. This was Betsy Aardsma, the student murdered in the Pattee Library stacks in the fall of 1969.
“There was something about that picture that ran in the paper that stuck with me,” DeKok says. “Why was she murdered? It seemed like such a fascinating story, but there was so much confusion.”
DeKok will relay the story to audiences at Webster’s Bookstore and Café on Saturday from 4-6 p.m. during a talk and book signing for his new book “Murder in the Stacks: Penn State, Betsy Aardsma, and the Killer Who Got Away.”
The stories in the Holland, Mich. newspaper never answered DeKok’s question about the motive for the murder, and neither did the murder investigation happening at Penn State. Still unsolved to this day, it seemed DeKok might have never gotten an answer – if he hadn’t taken matters into his own hands years later.
After Aardsma’s funeral, the newspapers in her hometown slowly stopped following the story, until it seemed she was almost forgotten. DeKok went on with his life, studying at Hope College in Michigan and pursing a career in journalism.
He wrote a well-received book about the Centralia mine fire (which started in the 1960’s and continues to burn beneath part of Pennsylvania to this day), and later got a job at the Patriot News in Harrisburg.
There, he discovered something: Aardsma wasn’t forgotten, and was still a topic of conversation among Penn State students. He wrote several articles on Aardsma’s murder case over the course his career at the Harrisburg paper, including a lengthy piece near the end of his tenure for which he interviewed her friends and family back in their hometown.
But still the story stuck with him, hovering in the back of his mind. Only six years his senior, Aardsma graduated from the same high school that DeKok attended. They hadn’t known each other, but they’d walked the same streets. They’d both ended up in the same part of Pennsylvania.
“Certainly the fact that she was from my hometown played a part in my interest,” DeKok says. “She seemed like the most unlikely of murder victims. Everyone I talked to described her the same way: beautiful, intelligent, friendly, kind. Not the type of young woman you’d think would be murdered.”
DeKok, drawing on his experience as an author and investigative journalist, decided to delve deeper into the story. Nearly five years of work later, his efforts yielded “Murder in the Stacks” – a book that he says unearths new details and uncovers Aardsma’s killer.
Unfortunately, Aardsma’s murder will never be technically solved. Rick Haeffner, the man that DeKok says all evidence points to, died in 2002 – forever denying the Aardsma case the closure of conviction.
But DeKok came across troubling facts: Haeffner’s strange and distressed arrival at a professor’s house within an hour of the murder, his record of pedophilia charges in Lancaster area courts, and his penchant for using frivolous lawsuits as a form of revenge against those who he believed had wronged him.
But most importantly, he learned of a conversation reportedly overheard by Rick Haeffner’s younger cousin – a conversation that Chris Haeffner regretted not taking to the police until years later.
Behind the Haeffner house one day, years after the murder, Rick Haeffner and his mother were in a bitter argument. Finally, his mother spat at him: “Why don’t you just kill me the way you killed that girl at Penn State?”
DeKok says Rick Haeffner angrily pushed his mother back inside the house, away from the alley where Chris, 15 at the time, had been listening. Later, Rick Haeffner tried to convince him he’d heard wrong, while avoiding using Aardsma’s name.
DeKok details all of this, and much more, in his book. DeKok says he spent over three years reviewing documents and interviewing police officers, investigators, university officials and other sources with connections to the case.
Even though Rick Haeffner can never face trial to determine his role in Aardsma’s murder once and for all, DeKok still feels like he’s accomplished something worthwhile.
“One thing I wanted to do was to kind of bring Betsy Aardsma back from quote-unquote ‘victim status’ to the intelligent, fascinating young woman she really was,” DeKok says. “Who she was became lost in victimhood. Though in the days following her murder, some stories told interesting things about her life and love, those very quickly went by the wayside, and she became just the victim.”
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