Murder in the Stacks: Penn State, Betsy Aardsma, and the Killer Who Got Away by David Dekok

Author:David Dekok [Dekok, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Retail, True Crime
ISBN: 9781493013890
Google: AZJuBAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0762780878
Barnesnoble: 0762780878
Publisher: Globe Pequot Press
Published: 2014-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Left Behind

One night in May of 1970, Louis C. Cotts, Betsy’s uncle, had a terrifying nightmare about her death. The terror ended only when Betsy came to him in the dream and told him that she was okay, that things were okay. She told him she was happy in Heaven and had no desire to return to the living. He awoke sobbing and continued to express emotion for several hours. About two weeks later, according to Dennis Wegner, Betsy’s brother-in-law, Cotts died when a pulmonary aneurysm burst in roughly the same spot where the killer’s knife had nicked Betsy’s pulmonary artery. She had been his favorite niece, he had urged her to go to Penn State to get away from the Coed Killer, and he never got over her murder.1

Neither did any other close family members. Dick Aardsma, her father, sank back into alcohol and bad driving, not necessarily together. A gentle man who liked to read history, his alcohol problem predated Betsy’s death. Jan Sasamoto, Betsy’s friend, recalled that she thought him a little different, a little silly at times. And a terrible driver, which she did not connect with his drinking until much later. On February 20, 1971, a Saturday, Dick Aardsma was driving north on M-40 around 8:40 a.m. when his car collided with another car on wet pavement near the big curve in the highway at East 48th Street, a mile or two from his house. Aardsma, who was fifty-five years old, was admitted to Holland Hospital with injuries to his nose, chest, and right arm. Two teenagers in the other car, both members of the Holland Christian High School wrestling team, were treated for cuts and bruises.2

Esther Aardsma descended into deep depression after her daughter’s death but coped with it largely on her own. Therapy was not a realistic option in Holland at that time. She and Dick kept to themselves. Bernice Kolenbrander, a neighbor for years on East 37th Street, said she didn’t know them very well. “They were quiet people,” she said. Neither parent phoned for updates on their daughter’s case, according to Sergeant George Keibler, the lead investigator of the murder. For the first three or four years after 1969, Keibler made a point of calling them once a year, or more often if he thought they might have seen something in the media about the investigation. There wasn’t much news coverage after the spring of 1970, though, just anniversary updates that reported the murder was still unsolved. Keibler told his men that any call to the Aardsmas had to be cleared through him. He didn’t want them bothered about something minor.3

David L. Wright, Betsy’s boyfriend and unofficial fiancé, says he grieved for “two or three months” after her murder, a period that was “pretty bleak.” Then he started dating again, first with a nursing student, according to his medical school friend, Ian Osborn, and then, according to Wright, with the roommate of Osborn’s girlfriend at Elizabethtown College near Hershey.

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