Campus Crimes: The Murder of Betsy Aardsma

The third episode of Campus Crimes follows the events of the Friday after Thanksgiving 1969, when 22-year-old graduate student Betsy Aardsma was stabbed through the heart in the basement stacks of Penn State's Pattee Library, surrounded by people, in broad daylight, and dead within minutes. A man walked calmly out of the stacks, said five words, and vanished; no one was ever charged. Decades of institutional silence, a scrubbed crime scene, and a suspect who died before investigators assembled the full picture left her family without justice. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join atcrimehouseplus.com http://crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse https://www.instagram.com/crimehouse/TikTok: @Crimehouse https://www.tiktok.com/@crimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudios https://www.facebook.com/crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Crime House.

• 0:41Vanessa Richardson?

  There are places where you expect danger and places where you don't. A library is supposed to be the second kind. It's quiet, it's public, it's full of people. On a college campus, it's probably the safest room there is. The only place where the worst thing that can happen to you is a late fee. On the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1969, a 22-year-old graduate student walked down a narrow staircase into the basement stacks of the library at Penn State. It was late afternoon. There were other people just a few rows away. She was looking for a book. A few minutes later, there was a crash, books and metal shelving hitting the floor. A man walked quickly out of the stacks,

• 1:25Vanessa Richardson?

  passed two students, and said five words. "Somebody better help that girl." Then he was gone, up the stairs and out into the dark. The young woman on the floor had been stabbed once through the heart. She died within minutes in a room full of people. Her name was Betsy Aardsma. Her murder has never been solved because so many people and so many institutions looked at something terrible and, one by one, they chose to look away.

• 2:14Vanessa Richardson?

  This is Serial Killers and Murderous Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson. This is the third episode of our latest Crime House limited series, Campus Crimes. Four Sundays, four tragic crimes connected to American universities. Please rate, review, and follow the show. If you're a Crime House Plus subscriber, all four episodes of Campus Crimes are available right now, completely ad-free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap "Try Free" on the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds show page on Apple Podcasts. Along with early access to this series, you'll also get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early.

• 2:58Vanessa Richardson?

  Before we begin, you should know this episode describes murder and the sexual abuse of children, so please listen with care. So far in this series, we've watched two institutions bury an ugly truth. A university that hid a poisoning, a police department that filed away a killing as an accident. Today's story is different because this crime was never solved at all. Betsy Aardsma was a bright, generous graduate student, a poet who dreamed of joining the Peace Corps and becoming a teacher. And on an ordinary afternoon in 1969, she was stabbed to death in the middle of a crowded university library with people all around her.

• 3:40Vanessa Richardson?

  More than 50 years later, no one has ever been charged. In this episode, I'll tell you about the young woman Betsy was and the future she was building, the minute or two in the library stacks that ended it and the long, cold decades that followed. The case stayed in that limbo until two determined strangers found the man almost everyone now believes did it, someone who never had to answer for his crimes. And running underneath it all, the question this whole series keeps circling back to, but in its bleakest form. Every other story here is about a truth that got buried. Betsy's is about a truth that surfaced too late to matter,

• 4:22Vanessa Richardson?

  years after the only man who could answer for it was dead. And a truth that arrives after the grave doesn't convict anyone. It just tells you what you were robbed of.

• 4:40Vanessa Richardson?

  Betsy Aardsma grew up in Holland, Michigan, a small, tidy town on the shore of Lake Michigan, the second of four children in a religious, conservative family. By all accounts, she was the kind of person you'd want as a friend. Warm, funny, and generous. She loved poetry, reading and writing it. And from an early age, she wanted a life that was bigger than the one her hometown had mapped out for her. Her family expected her to go to Hope College, a small Christian school right there in Holland, where her parents and her older sister had gone before her. So Betsy went. And almost immediately, she knew it wasn't for her. The school was strict. The world it offered felt too small.

• 5:23Vanessa Richardson?

  And Betsy, bright and restless and hungry for more, chafed against it. After two years, she did the thing she'd wanted to do all along. She transferred to the University of Michigan. This was the late 1960s, and Michigan was a huge, public university crackling with energy. Anti-war marches, new ideas, a whole generation questioning everything. Betsy thrived in it. She'd started out thinking she might go into medicine, but she switched to English, to the poetry and literature she loved, and began to imagine a future as a college professor. For a while, she dreamed of something else, too. She wanted to join the Peace Corps to spend a year doing good somewhere far from home.

• 6:08Vanessa Richardson?

  Betsy Aardsma wanted her life to mean something, and she was in a hurry to go build it. And then she fell in love. His name was David Wright. He was a pre-med student, ambitious and easy to like. By their senior year, the two of them were serious. But graduation forced a decision, the way it does for so many college couples. David was going to medical school. He'd been accepted at Penn State's program. And Betsy had a choice to make. She could chase her own plans, the Peace Corps and the wider world, or she could follow the man she loved. She chose David. In the fall of 1969, Betsy set aside the year abroad,

• 6:53Vanessa Richardson?

  packed up her life, and enrolled as a graduate student in the English department at Penn State in the middle of Pennsylvania. She was 22 years old. It should have been the start of something wonderful. Instead, from almost the moment she arrived, something felt wrong. Part of it was simple disappointment. David, it turned out, wasn't going to be nearby at all. Penn State's medical school was in Hershey, about 100 miles from the main campus where Betsy was living and studying. So the boyfriend she'd rearranged her whole future for was a long bus ride away. And she saw him mostly on weekends. Betsy tried to bridge the gap by writing him letters and making the trip to Hershey again and again,

• 7:38Vanessa Richardson?

  but it left her isolated. She didn't have much of a social life. Outside of her roommate, a young woman named Sharon Brant, it's not clear if she was close to many people at all. But it was more than loneliness. Betsy told her family more than once that she had a bad feeling about the place. She couldn't explain it. She just knew that something felt off. She talked about leaving. She told her mother she didn't really know why she was there. It's the kind of thing that's easy to write off as ordinary homesickness until you know how the story ends. At that point, it starts to sound like something else. And there's something Betsy almost certainly didn't know. The campus she'd come to, and one building on it in particular,

• 8:23Vanessa Richardson?

  was not as safe as it looked.

• 8:27Vanessa Richardson?

  In 1969, Penn State was a big, fast-growing university in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, a place so pleasant, so seemingly untroubled, that people called the area "Happy Valley." At the heart of the campus stood Petit Library, an enormous building. And at the heart of the library was a section students called "The Stacks." It was level after level of tall metal shelving packed with books in long, narrow rows with low ceilings and poor sightlines. Two people couldn't pass in an aisle without turning sideways. It was quiet back there. It was easy to be alone and to go unseen. The people who ran the library knew this was a problem.

• 9:11Vanessa Richardson?

  The Stacks had a reputation. For years, women on campus had reported being harassed there, followed, violated, cornered by men who used the isolation of those aisles as cover. The director of the libraries had gone to the head of campus security and asked more than once for more patrols in the building. He was worried something bad was going to happen. It didn't get much attention. The campus police had other priorities in 1969: student protests, the anti-war movement, keeping an eye on demonstrators. And there was something else, an attitude of the era that's hard to hear now. When young women reported being harassed, their reports were too often waved away.

• 9:55Vanessa Richardson?

  Boys being boys, not worth the manpower. The complaints piled up, and the extra patrols never came. So the danger in the Stacks was known. It was documented. It was raised by the very people responsible for that building with the very people who could have done something about it. They chose to look away instead.

• 10:19Vanessa Richardson?

  Betsy didn't know any of this. To her, the library was just the library, the place you went to get your work done. And by late November of 1969, she had plenty of it. A big paper due for an English class, finals right behind it, and the long trips to see David squeezed into the gaps. Then Thanksgiving arrived, and for once, the work could wait. Instead of making the long trip home to Michigan, Betsy and David decided to spend the holiday together in Pennsylvania with David's roommates in Hershey. So a few days before Thanksgiving, Betsy took the bus there. And on Thanksgiving Day, she and David and a group of his fellow medical students shared a holiday dinner.

• 11:04Vanessa Richardson?

  David wanted her to stay for the whole weekend, but Betsy said no. That paper was hanging over her, and the library she needed was back on the main campus. She told David she really had to get back and get to work. He was disappointed, but he understood. He had studying of his own to do, so they agreed to spend the weekend apart, and he drove her to the bus. He watched her get on it. He watched it pull away. And that was the last time David Wright ever saw Betsy Aardsma alive. Betsy rode back to campus, and true to her word, on Friday, November 28th, the day after Thanksgiving, she returned to Petit Library to keep working. Her roommate walked over with her,

• 11:48Vanessa Richardson?

  and the two of them made a plan to meet up that evening and go see a movie. Then they split up inside. It was a quiet day on campus. Most students were still away for the long holiday weekend. On a normal Friday afternoon, hundreds of people would pass through the library between 4:30 and 5 o'clock. That day, only about 90 did. Sometime after 4:00 PM, Betsy stopped in to see one of her professors about her paper. Then she walked to the card catalog, found the book she was looking for, and headed down a narrow staircase into the stacks, into the long, quiet, low-ceilinged rows at the core of the library. It was just before 4:45 in the afternoon.

• 12:31Vanessa Richardson?

  She had about 15 minutes to live.

• 12:47Vanessa Richardson?

  What happened next took only a minute or two. But to understand it, you have to picture the space. The core stacks were dim and cramped, the aisles so tight that two people had to turn sideways to pass. Sound moved strangely back there. And on that quiet holiday Friday, there were only a handful of people scattered through the rows. Betsy walked into aisle 51, looking for her book. Somewhere close by, a library assistant saw her, a young woman with long brown hair in a red dress. He didn't know her, but he'd remember her later. And then, at around 4:45, it happened. A student nearby heard what he described as a gasp and then a loud crash,

• 13:31Vanessa Richardson?

  the sound of books and heavy metal shelving toppling to the concrete floor. Back in the stacks, that kind of noise wasn't necessarily alarming. The rolling carts the staff used were notoriously loud. Books fell, people assumed it was nothing. But two students went to look. One was a young woman named Merrily Erdley, a classmate of Betsy's. The other was an international student named Juao Wafinda. As they came toward the source of the noise, a man came quickly out of the stacks toward them. They both remember him. Somewhere around six feet tall, dressed in khakis, and they both noticed that he was keeping one hand oddly out of sight. He didn't run, not at first. He looked at them, and he said simply,

• 14:15Vanessa Richardson?

  "Somebody better help that girl." And then he turned and moved fast toward the stairs. For a second, the two students just stood there, taking in what he'd said. Then they split. Wafinda went after the man, chasing him up the stairs and toward the exit. Erdley went to the stacks to find the girl. She found Betsy lying on the floor of aisle 51, surrounded by books and shelving that had come down with her. Erdley knelt beside her and realized with a jolt that she knew her. They were in the same program. Betsy was unconscious, but there was almost no blood, just a small spot on the white turtleneck she wore under her red dress. Erdley thought maybe she'd fainted or had a seizure.

• 15:00Vanessa Richardson?

  She called for help. A small crowd began to gather. Someone tried to help Betsy breathe. Someone called for an ambulance. And the whole time, none of them understood what they were actually looking at. Meanwhile, Juao Wafinda had lost his man. The stranger had gotten out of the building and vanished into the cold, late-afternoon dark. He was never identified. To this day, no one knows for certain who he was. The paramedics arrived a little after 5 o'clock. By then, Betsy had stopped breathing. They rushed her to the university's health center, and it was there, in an exam room, that a doctor finally found it. A single stab wound to the left side of her chest,

• 15:43Vanessa Richardson?

  about an inch wide and three to four inches deep. The blade had gone in cleanly, severed the pulmonary artery, and pierced her heart. That was why there'd been so little blood. Betsy hadn't bled onto the floor. She'd bled internally, into her own chest, the blood filling her lungs. That was also, almost certainly, why no one had heard her scream. She physically couldn't. And the little blood that did seep through her clothes had been hidden by the deep red of her dress. Betsy Aardsma was pronounced dead at around 5:50 PM. She was 22 years old.

• 16:25Vanessa Richardson?

  And here's the part that still makes investigators wince more than 50 years later. Because no one at the scene had realized Betsy was stabbed, because it looked like a girl who'd simply collapsed, no one treated the stacks as a crime scene. And in the time between Betsy being carried out and anyone understanding that she'd been murdered, the single most important place in the entire case was destroyed. The fallen books were picked up and reshelved. The floor was mopped. Students went back to walking through the aisles. By the time the state police grasped that they were investigating a homicide and got back to aisle 51, whatever might have been there, a fingerprint, a footprint, the weapon, a trace of the killer, was gone.

• 17:09Vanessa Richardson?

  A young state trooper named Mike Simmers was one of the first to understand what had happened. He'd been called to what he thought was a medical episode when he learned at the hospital that it was a stabbing, that it was murder. He knew immediately he was in over his head, and he called for backup. But the backup was arriving at a scene that had already been scrubbed clean. What followed was one of the largest investigations in the region's history, and one of the most frustrating.

• 17:38Vanessa Richardson?

  At its peak, dozens of state troopers worked the case, running a command post on campus and interviewing hundreds of students in the days and weeks after the murder. They searched the entire campus for the weapon. They never found it. They offered a reward of $25,000. That was a small fortune at the time, worth well over $200,000 today. It went unclaimed. Even the one scrap of physical evidence they did have, a fine spray of blood droplets that matched Betsy's blood type, was too small of a sample to be of any use. They did have two witnesses who'd seen the fleeing man, and investigators worked with them to build composite sketches. And here's a detail that will matter enormously later.

• 18:23Vanessa Richardson?

  Two sketches were made. One of the two was built with the witnesses who'd seen the man most clearly, Wafinda and a library desk clerk. According to later accounts, it was a sharp, detailed likeness, a real face, the kind that gets a suspect identified. But for reasons that have never fully been explained, that sketch was never released to the public. The one that did go out was vaguer, and it led nowhere. Investigators chased theory after theory. Betsy had been stabbed a single time, precisely in a way that suggested her killer either knew exactly what he was doing, or got horrifyingly lucky. She hadn't screamed, she hadn't run. There were no defensive wounds.

• 19:07Vanessa Richardson?

  All of it pointed toward one uncomfortable conclusion, that Betsy had likely known the person who killed her, or at least, never saw the attack coming. She'd been comfortable enough to stand there in a narrow aisle, close enough for someone to drive a knife into her heart. There were other ideas, too. Because the stacks had that reputation as a place where illicit things happened, some wondered whether Betsy had stumbled onto something she wasn't meant to see. Others floated the notion that she'd interrupted a drug deal. At one desperate point, investigators even wondered aloud about the serial killer, Ted Bundy, who was rumored to be in the region. None of it held up. None of it led anywhere, and a few real suspects came and went.

• 19:54Vanessa Richardson?

  The most obvious was Betsy's boyfriend, David Wright. Police went to see him that same night. He hadn't even learned yet that she was dead. He was devastated. And then horrified to realize they suspected him. But David had an airtight alibi. He'd been in Hershey, 100 miles away, studying with his fellow medical students at the time Betsy was killed. There was just no way he could have done it. He was cleared, though the loss would haunt him for the rest of his life. Then there was a man named Bill Spencer, a sculptor who'd recently lost his teaching job at the university. A few weeks after the murder, at a department Christmas party, Spencer started telling people he'd known Betsy, that she'd modeled for him,

• 20:38Vanessa Richardson?

  that he knew how easy it would have been to kill her. It got him reported to the police, but when they looked into him, it fell apart. He almost certainly hadn't known Betsy at all. In the end, investigators decided he was a troubled man, desperate to attach himself to a famous crime. So they let him go. And there was one of Betsy's own classmates, a young man named Larry Morer, who had spent some time with her that fall. Detectives looked at him closely enough to give him a polygraph. He passed. And crucially, the witness Merrily Erdley knew Larry Morer from their shared program, and she was certain the man she'd seen fleeing the stacks was not him. He was cleared, too.

• 21:23Vanessa Richardson?

  One by one, the leads dried up, and through all of it, there was the university itself. Penn State's president, a man named Eric Walker, was concerned enough about the case that he ran his own private investigation into it. On its face, that sounds like diligence, the head of the university personally determined to find a killer. But keep it in mind, because the question of what Penn State was really trying to protect, the truth, or itself, is one we're going to come back to. By the spring of 1970, the trail had gone cold. The most intense phase of the investigation wound down. The troopers went back to their other work, and Betsy Aardsma's murder settled into what

• 22:06Vanessa Richardson?

  it would remain for the next four decades: an open, unsolved case, a ghost story whispered by students walking past the library at night, and an unbearable absence for the people who had loved her. The man who walked out of the stacks and said, "Somebody better help that girl," had simply vanished. Or so it seemed. For more than 30 years, the case sat. The people who'd worked it retired or died. Betsy's family, unable to get answers, eventually stopped speaking about it publicly and tried to move forward with their lives.

• 22:50Vanessa Richardson?

  To new generations of Penn State students, Betsy Aardsma became more of a legend than a person. She was a story to scare freshmen with: the girl who was murdered in the library. But a few people couldn't let it go, and in the age of the internet, two of them found each other. One was a man named Derek Sherwood, who had grown up around Penn State and had been haunted by the story since childhood. He built a meticulous website, gathering everything he could find about Betsy's life and death. The other was David DeCock, a journalist and former newspaper reporter who, as it happened, had grown up in the same small town as Betsy: Holland, Michigan.

• 23:32Vanessa Richardson?

  He had never forgotten seeing her face on the front page of the local paper the day after she was killed. DeCock started digging into the case for a newspaper story, and then for a book. Once they connected decades later, DeCock and Sherwood started working the case together with fresh eyes, and the two of them kept arriving at the same name: a name that had been in front of the police from the very beginning: a man who had lived in Betsy's own dorm. His name was Richard Hefner. But before I tell you about him, I want to be very clear about something, and I'm going to say it more than once because it matters. Richard Hefner was never charged with Betsy Aardsma's murder.

• 24:16Vanessa Richardson?

  He was never tried for it. He never confessed to it. The case against him is entirely circumstantial. Much of it assembled after his death, and to this day, Betsy's murder remains officially unsolved. What I'm about to lay out is the case that two authors, and quietly, some of the investigators, came to believe. It's not a verdict. No court ever rendered one. With that said, here is what they found. Richard Hefner was a graduate student at Penn State in 1969, studying geology. He was, by all accounts, brilliant: a gifted young scientist who'd already begun to make a name in his field.

• 24:58Vanessa Richardson?

  He was also, by many accounts, deeply strange. People described him as socially off and prone to sudden, frightening flashes of anger. And he lived in the same dorm complex as Betsy Aardsma. That fall, before Thanksgiving, Betsy and Hefner had spent some time together. He'd asked her out, and she, lonely, with David 100 miles away, had gone along at first. They got ice cream, they went bowling, they had dinner. Hefner considered these dates. Betsy did not. Within about a week, she made it clear to him that she was committed to her boyfriend, and that whatever this was, it could only ever be a friendship. Hefner didn't take it well.

• 25:41Vanessa Richardson?

  Based on later accounts from his own family, he had convinced himself that he and Betsy were more than friends. He told his relatives he was seeing a girl at school named Betsy. He told them he planned to propose to her over Thanksgiving break. This appears to have been, start to finish, a fantasy of his own construction. And around the same time, Betsy started telling people that she was growing wary of him, that he had started to scare her, which brings us back to that Friday. Investigators later learned that Hefner, like Betsy, had come back to campus early from the Thanksgiving holiday. He was around, and he was known to carry a pocket knife everywhere he went, which,

• 26:24Vanessa Richardson?

  as a geology student, wasn't necessarily odd. No one saw Richard Hefner kill Betsy Aardsma. No one can put the knife in his hand, but here is what is documented. About an hour after Betsy was pronounced dead, Hefner turned up, agitated and out of breath, at the home of his geology mentor, a professor named Lauren Wright, and he blurted out something strange. He said, "Have you heard? A girl I dated was murdered in the library." He didn't seem grief-stricken. According to the professor, he seemed keyed up, almost excited. Think about the timing of that. The murder was barely public knowledge yet, and here was Hefner, within about an hour,

• 27:07Vanessa Richardson?

  at his professor's door, already knowing a young woman had been killed in the library, already describing her as someone he'd dated. Hefner was questioned by police in the weeks after the murder. Betsy's roommate had told them that Betsy used to spend time with the man from their dorm, and that they might want to talk to him. When they did, Hefner was calm and cooperative. He admitted he'd known Betsy and taken her out a few times, and said she'd ended things because of her boyfriend. But he also told them that he'd been at his parents' home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and had never gone into the library at all.

• 27:47Vanessa Richardson?

  Both of those statements appear to have been false, but his mother backed up his alibi. His mentor said nothing about the strange visit, and the police, with no physical evidence and a scrubbed crime scene, moved on. But Richard Hefner never did. In the years that followed, people who knew him said he brought Betsy's murder up in odd, unsettling ways. On at least one occasion, about a year after the killing, he took a teenage boy who worked in his family's rock shop to the Penn State library, led him down into the stacks, walked him to a specific spot, and told him, "A girl I used to date was murdered here. You're standing on the exact spot where it happened."

• 28:32Vanessa Richardson?

  And then there's the darkest part of Richard Hefner's story, which is not really about Betsy at all, and which is part of why, decades later, people finally started to talk. Hefner had a pattern across his life of predatory behavior toward boys. In 1975, by then a Penn State PhD with a job waiting in California, Hefner was arrested in Lancaster and charged with sexually abusing a 12-year-old boy, one of several who worked in his family's rock shop. The case went to trial the next year. It ended in a hung jury, and after a legal fight, he couldn't be retried. His record was eventually expunged.

• 29:16Vanessa Richardson?

  And I want to be precise here: Richard Hefner was never convicted of that crime, and the case itself later became the subject of real dispute about how it was handled. But the accusations against him, from both before it and after, followed him for the rest of his life. It was those 1975 charges that finally shook something loose, because when his old geology mentor heard that Hefner had been arrested for molesting a boy, he finally told someone about that strange visit to his home the night Betsy died. But watch where it went. He told a dean. The dean told the university's lawyer, and there, inside the institution, it stopped.

• 29:59Vanessa Richardson?

  It did not reach the police, not for years. And there was more. Around that same time, Hefner's own nephew overheard a furious argument between Hefner and his mother about the molestation charges. And in the middle of it, according to the nephew, Hefner's mother screamed at her son a sentence that has hung over this case ever since. "You killed that girl, and now you're killing me."

• 30:26Vanessa Richardson?

  Richard Hefner spent the rest of his life as an increasingly bitter and erratic figure, feuding with neighbors, filing lawsuit after lawsuit. In 2002, on a geology trip out west, he died of a heart condition. He was 58 years old. He was never charged with Betsy Aardsma's murder. Whatever he knew, he took with him. It was after his death that Sherwood and DeCock pulled the whole picture together: the fixated neighbor, the rejection, the fantasy engagement, the knife he always carried, the professor's doorstep an hour later, the lies to police, the buried sketch, the mother's terrible words. Piece by piece, they put together a case

• 31:11Vanessa Richardson?

  no one had ever assembled while he was alive to answer it. Years after his death, in the late 2000s, they took what they found to the authorities. But by then, the man they were describing had been dead for three years. There was no one left to charge. The state trooper who worked the cold case would tell Betsy's family that, as far as he was concerned, it was solved. One of the original investigators asked years later about Hefner, put it simply, "I think you've got your man." But "I think you've got your man" is not a conviction, and it never became one. So step back and look at how many people over many years saw a piece of this and looked away.

• 31:55Vanessa Richardson?

  A university that knew its library was dangerous and wouldn't spare the patrols to protect the women in it. A campus that scrubbed the crime scene clean before anyone grasped that a woman had been murdered. A professor who sat on what he knew for years, then handed it to administrators who buried it inside the institution rather than take it to the police. And according to the journalist who dug deepest into this case, a university that seemed to want the whole thing to simply go away, to the point that the records which should exist about it are somehow missing from the university's own archives. That instinct, protect the name, bury the truth,

• 32:37Vanessa Richardson?

  is one Penn State would become far more infamous for decades later, when it shielded a child predator named Jerry Sandusky. Betsy Aardsma's case was, in a sense, the same lesson available much earlier, and it went unlearned.

• 32:57Vanessa Richardson?

  More than 50 years later, Betsy Aardsma's murder is still officially unsolved. No one was ever arrested. No one was ever tried. Her family never got the one thing that might have let them rest: a conviction. And that's the part of this story I keep coming back to, because Betsy Aardsma was exactly the kind of person a university is supposed to protect and send out into the world. A poet, a young woman who dreamed of the Peace Corps, of teaching, of a life that mattered. She gave up her own bold plans to follow someone she loved, and she ended up alone in a strange place that frightened her, working late in a library because she wanted to do right by her studies.

• 33:41Vanessa Richardson?

  And she was killed there, in the middle of the one building on that campus devoted entirely to knowledge, surrounded by people in the fading light of an ordinary afternoon. The library was supposed to be the safest place she could be, but it wasn't. The danger there was known and ignored. The scene was wiped away before anyone knew it was a scene. The people who suspected the truth stayed silent or passed it quietly up a chain until it disappeared. That's why, half a century on, there's still no justice for her. This is the third Sunday in a row we've watched an institution face something terrible

• 34:24Vanessa Richardson?

  and choose, again and again, to look the other way. But this time, the looking away didn't just protect a reputation, it let a killer walk out of a library and live out his whole life a free man. Betsy deserved better. She deserved every year she didn't get.

• 35:00Vanessa Richardson?

  Thanks so much for listening. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Be sure to come back next Sunday for the final episode of Campus Crimes, where we close on a college basketball program and a player who's murdered by his own teammate. But the most disturbing part of that story isn't the killing, it's what the man in charge did afterward, a scheme to protect his program by painting the victim, a young man who could no longer speak for himself, as something he wasn't. And you'll still get all our normal episodes every Monday and Thursday. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on Instagram at @CrimeHouse. Don't forget to rate, review,

• 35:45Vanessa Richardson?

  and follow Serial Killers and Murderous Minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Serial Killers and Murderous Minds listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap "Try Free" at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds show page.

• 36:19Vanessa Richardson?

  Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds team: Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Lori Marinelli, Natalie Pritzowski, Sarah Kemp, Alyssa Fox, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening.

• 36:48Vanessa Richardson?

  If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.