Post by Joanna on Nov 16, 2014 22:34:46 GMT -5
With Murder in the Stacks, David DeKok revisits unsolved 1969 Penn State murder
One day in 1969 graduate student Betsy Aardsma was fatally stabbed to death while doing research in the Penn State library stacks. The case remains unsolved. In Murder in the Stacks: Penn State, Betsy Aardsma and the Killer Who Got Away (Globe Pequot Press, $18.95) Harrisburg-based author and former journalist David DeKok thinks he has solved the mystery. His suspect is a certain pedophile with a nasty temper named Rick Haefner, who was in the stacks at the time. Haefner and Aardsma had briefly been friends until Aardsma discovered he was “a creep.” Was Haefner the killer?
No solid evidence exists to make the case either way. Technological limitations, a tainted crime scene and a dearth of witness details hampered the police then as now in drawing conclusions. Only two additional pieces of information point to Haefner, who is now dead: his cousin’s memories – long forgotten – of a conversation he overheard, and a second-hand account of another conversation that was not immediately taken to the police. These bits of data do not do not a case make.
While the research in this book is extensive, one might say exhaustive, it lacks focus. The subtitle more or less indicates this lack. One narrative arc of the book is a blow-by-blow account of the victim’s life, nearly all of which has nothing whatever to do with her murder and holds little interest for someone who didn’t know her. Interspersed with information about the victim are details about Penn State’s culture and its student unrest during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Penn State’s culture is pertinent to the case, the level of detail about it and Penn State’s student activism is excessive.
A third part of the story is about Haefner. Here lies the most puzzling part of the story. DeKok ably shows that Haefner molested boys and that he was cruel and vindictive. But although DeKok states many times that Haefner had special malice for women, he seems to have few examples of Haefner’s singling out women for his anger. It’s true Haefner once severely beat a woman and he often yelled at women and scared them, but he also abused and frightened men, boys and the elderly in various ways, so it’s hard to say whether he had more animosity toward women than he had for people in general. If he did kill Aardsma, she would be his only murder victim, as he seems to have directed his energies toward frivolous lawsuits, molesting boys and trying to make a name for himself as a geologist.
The author also adds reams of minutiae to minor characters, for instance, cataloging the birthplace, college and board position of Penn State’s general counsel or enumerating the life and religion of the president of Aardsma’s undergraduate college. This torrent of extraneous detail bogs down the story.
Another frustrating tendency in the book is to mention the possibility that more notorious or well-known people were involved in the Aardsma case. Did Haefner learn a trick or two from murder cult leader Charles Manson while conducting geology research in Death Valley? Did serial killer Ted Bundy commit the crime? Was the Zodiac Killer involved? Did the late former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter play some role in helping Haefner? “Maybe, maybe not,” is the author’s coy response to his own rhetorical questions.
A last frustration with the book is its conclusion. It’s not new. As DeKok writes in this book, author Derek Sherwood drew the same conclusion from the same evidence in his 2011 book, Who Killed Betsy?: Uncovering Penn State University’s Most Notorious Unsolved Crime. Indeed, this book seems more like a rehash of that 2011 book, but not as well-written and saddled with more extraneous detail.
In crafting a story, an author must carefully consider what details to put in and what to leave out. One must be willing to “kill your babies,” as some editors put it – in other words, be willing to leave out details that don’t propel the narrative, no matter how much time they took to research. It’s a painful process, but one from which this book would have benefitted.
Source: Laura Schneiderman, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 16, 2014.