Murder in the stacks

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November 25, 2009

By HUGH CONRAD The Tribune-Democrat Wed Nov 25, 2009, 10:01 PM EST

On a Friday evening 40 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 a block away. I thought that was odd because most students had left campus Wednesday and stayed home, cutting classes the day after Thanksgiving.

As a friend and I were eating in the dining hall, another friend came charging toward us with bright, glazed eyes and said, “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 graduate student, had been brutally murdered in the library stacks that afternoon.

That was the reason for the sirens at Pattee, the murder having taken place shortly before I left my class.

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 had 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.

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 in.

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 of 40 years.

Today, as Thanksgiving is upon us, I thought about how the tragedy must have impacted Aardsma’s family, knowing that the killer probably will 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.

Hugh Conrad is a freelance writer.

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