The unsolved murder of Betsy Aardsma
STATE COLLEGE — For more than five decades, the story of Betsy Aardsma has drifted through Penn State like a ghost story. A graduate student and just 22 years old, Aardsma was stabbed once in the heart in the basement stacks of Pattee Library.
Her killer was never found.
It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, Nov. 28, 1969. Most students had gone home, leaving the campus quiet. Betsy, who had spent the holiday with her boyfriend in Hershey, returned early to study. She and her roommate walked to the library that afternoon. Not long after 4:45 p.m., books clattered to the floor in aisle 51. Minutes later, Betsy was rushed to the student hospital, where she was pronounced dead at around 5:50 p.m.
At first, no one believed it was murder.
A young state trooper on campus, Mike Simmers, said the call came in as a medical emergency. Maybe a fainting spell. But a doctor revealed the truth: Betsy had been stabbed once in the chest, the blade piercing her pulmonary artery. The wound filled her lungs with blood so fast she couldn’t scream. That also helped explain why there was so little visible blood in the aisle.
Back at the library, investigators made a grim discovery: the crime scene had already been cleaned. The books were reshelved, the floors mopped and students were walking about. Whatever evidence had been left was largely gone. A witness recalled a man running from the stacks. A rough sketch was made, but then the trail cooled. Troopers interviewed hundreds of students and chased leads from Pennsylvania to Michigan.
No one was ever charged.
Some fragments did survive those first chaotic hours. Investigators documented a faint spray of tiny droplets consistent with movement after the stabbing. They also noted other biological traces in the stacks but none of them brought a suspect to an arrest.
Theories piled up in the decades that followed. Some believe her killer was someone she knew, a man whose romantic advances had been rejected. Others tried to tie it, without evidence, to serial killers who moved through Pennsylvania around that time. Author and journalist David DeKok argued in his reporting and book that another Penn State graduate student, Richard Haefner, was responsible, though he was never named an official suspect by law enforcement and died in 2002.
The case remains open and unsolved.
Time has turned the murder into myth for younger generations. A late-night library legend that upperclassmen passed to freshmen with a nervous laugh. But for those who knew Betsy, and for the original investigators, the story never stopped being a punch to the ribs. For some, there isn’t a day that passes they don’t think about her. While others close to the case still voice a simple hope: that someone, somewhere, remembers something that can be put on paper and tested against the record.
Behind the headlines was a real person.
Betsy Ruth Aardsma grew up in Holland, Mich., loved poetry and had the kind of Midwestern politeness that makes an impression even in a big campus town. She came to Penn State in the fall, just eight weeks before the murder, to study English.
If you’ve ever navigated the old core stacks at Pattee, you know the geography: long metal aisles, tight sightlines, fluorescent hum. It’s a place built for quiet, not chaos. That’s partly why the story sticks. We expect libraries to be safe, predictable and orderly. When violence shows up in a space like that, it leaves a seam you can still see if you know where to look.
There’s a reason to tell this story now. Cases like Betsy’s have a way of fading until they’re little more than a line in campus legend. The people who worked the case retire. Classmates move away. Files settle and collect dust. But communities are built on memory and memory needs tending. Sometimes the smallest detail — a face in a stairwell, a time on a clock, a phrase a stranger said while moving past — shakes something loose.
This isn’t a whodunit from the comfort of hindsight. It’s an effort to look closely without indulging the rumor mill, to understand how a quiet campus afternoon turned into a half-century of unanswered questions and to keep a person, not a legend, at the center.
If you have information, memories or materials related to the Aardsma case, email me at lrogers@centrecountygazette.com. Even a small fragment — a time, a face, a name you heard once — could matter.
Betsy Aardsma walked into the library to study. She never walked out.
