Murder in the stacks, 1969

By HUGH CONRAD

On a Friday evening [56] years ago, one day after Thanksgiving, I left a class at Penn State’s Willard Building to return to my dining hall for supper. I heard a large number of sirens near the Pattee Library, which was just about a block away from Willard. I thought that was odd because most students had left campus Wednesday and stayed home, cutting classes the day after Thanksgiving.

Only four students out of 66 remainded in the fourth floor of Beaver Hall -- and two of those were members of the Blue Band who had to travel to Pitt for the football game. .

As a friend and I were eating in the dining hall, another student came charging toward us with bright, glazed eyes, yelling, “There was a murder at the library.”

We looked at him and said, sarcastically, “Right,” accusing him of watching Alfred Hitchcock's movie “Psycho” the night before.

Our friend was right.Betsy Aardsma, a 22-year-old English graduate student, had been brutally murdered in the library stacks that afternoon.That was the reason for the sirens at Pattee since the murder had taken place shortly before I left my class.

The Murder

Eerily, that murder has never been solved despite a plethora of information and leads that have attracted some diverse groups, even paranormal aficionados.When Aardsma's body was discovered in the stacks, the wound was not readily discernible beneath her red dress.

Her body was moved to the Ritenour Health Center on campus before a physician there realized that a homicide had taken place.Moving the body made the investigation more difficult.What has baffled investigators, who continue to follow the case today, was that the young graduate student in English appeared to have no enemies, so no rationale for the murder has ever emerged.

Aardsma had arrived at Penn State that fall from Michigan, having applied there because her boyfriend, David Wright, enrolled as a student at the Hershey Medical School. She spent Thanksgiving with Wright in Hershey, then returned to campus to work on a research paper.Wright was the first target of investigators, as were Aardsma’s English 501 research writing professors, Harrison Meserole and Nicholas Joukovsky.

None has been tied to the murder.State police have conducted an exhaustive investigation, and they continue to hold all of the evidence and texts of interviews at their Rockview barracks.

Pattee Library

I remember returning a book to Pattee a few days after the murder and noticing some men in suits pretending to be reading newspapers as they carefully scrutinized each person coming into the large building. I have spent countless hours in the Pattee stacks, as an undergraduate and graduate student, absorbing their musty smell as I thought, “Maybe this was where the murder occurred.” I was not frightened, but I have always been interested despite the passage [more than five decades].

This week, as Thanksgiving is upon us, I still have a pit in my stomach when I think about how the tragedy must have impacted Aardsma’s family, knowing that the killer will probably never be found, and they will never know why this senseless act occurred.

This murder did not impact my life as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy did when I was a high school sophomore, or the 9/11 attacks when I was an adult. Nevertheless, it continues to affect my emotions despite the passage of 40 years.

Originally written as a newspaper column in November 2009

Hugh Conrad is a freelance writer.