jashrema
Verified insider - Sierah Joughin case
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Forgive me if this has been posted before but the thing that really bothers me is that I'm not quite sure where the 2 person killer link came from (the 2 guys that left the area?) and I have read on this thread that she was attacked from behind. Considering that the knife went thru her breast and hit her heart, I don't see where that's possible. It sounds more likely that someone approached her and just stabbed her. No defensive wounds, no screams, etc. completely by surprise and the article below also suggests that. There is a direct quote from the pathologist saying it was a face to face attack. Also, her so called fiance didn't even go to her funeral? WTF? Is this guy totally negated as a suspect?
Anyway, here is the article, lots of info, and again, pardon me if it has been posted...I also have to continue it in my next post as article is overlimit for posting...
by DAVID DeKOK, Of The Patriot-News Sunday December 07, 2008, 12:01 AM
The Patriot-NewsA newspaper clipping from 1969 describes the investigation into the death of Betsy Aardsma, which remains unsolved.
They are old men now, long retired from the state police, but they can't forget a slaying they never solved. They are haunted by the memory of Betsy Aardsma, a woman from Holland, Mich., who on Nov. 28, 1969, lay dead before them on a gurney in a hallway of Ritenour Student Health Center at Penn State University.
"When I retired from the state police, I went to Arizona, but I never let it go," said Ron Tyger, 69, one of the original investigators.
See David DeKok's video on the mystery of Betsy Aardsma.
Aardsma was stabbed once in the chest while doing research in the cramped and dimly lit stacks of Pattee Library. As she slumped to the floor, pulling books down on top of herself, her killer pulled out the knife and fled into the night.
Between 30 and 40 state troopers worked on the case, interviewing hundreds of students and following leads around the country, especially to Michigan.
Nothing came of their efforts. And it disturbs them.
"I know these guys want me to solve this," said Trooper Kent Bernier, the current investigator, who at age 40 was born the year before the killing. "They talk to me about it regularly.
"It means a lot to them because it was a case that hit them square in the face back then. And it's never going to let me go, either," Bernier said.
Betsy Aardsma's friends and teachers said she was among the best America had to offer in the late 1960s.
Artistic and poetic, imbued with liberal ideals and empathy for the underprivileged, she planned to join the Peace Corps after graduating with honors from the University of Michigan in 1969.
But her boyfriend, David L. Wright, wouldn't promise to wait for her, so she dropped those plans and followed him to central Pennsylvania.
Wright began classes at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, while Aardsma enrolled in the graduate English program at Penn State's main campus, taking the bus to Harrisburg on weekends.
She perished in one of the bloodier years of the 1960s, when the Manson family and the Zodiac killer were attacking in California and an unknown serial killer was murdering women around the University of Michigan.
Aardsma's family were relieved she was leaving Ann Arbor. They thought State College would be safe.
Instead, they were about to enter a nightmare that has lasted four decades.
Bright and popular
Betsy Aardsma was like many other women in small towns across America when she came of age in the mid-1960s.
Intrigued by the larger world, wanting a life of the mind and a life of helping others, she was unsure about being a traditional wife and mother.
Her hometown was founded by Calvinist religious dissidents from the Netherlands in 1847 and was known for being conservative and insular. As the local saying went, "if you're not Dutch, you're not much." It was half joke, half belief.
Provided photo Betsy Aardsma, second from right, graduated from high school in Holland, Mich., in 1965.
In the 1960s, Holland had about 25,000 people, predominantly descendants of those original settlers and many, like the Aardsmas, having Dutch names.
The city has two dominant religious denominations, the moderate Reformed Church and the ultraconservative Christian Reformed Church. Both believe God's will determines every event in life, good or bad. Humans are "predestined" at birth for heaven or hell.
Betsy Aardsma's pastor at Trinity Reformed Church told mourners at her funeral that her killing was "God's will," according to one of her friends who was there.
Richard and Esther Aardsma, Betsy's parents, were graduates of Hope College, a Reformed Church liberal arts college in Holland. He worked as a sales tax auditor for the Michigan Treasury Department, and she was a homemaker and former teacher.
The Aardsmas were a solidly middle-class couple, raising their four children in a house on leafy West 37th Street in Holland. Betsy was the second-oldest.
Betsy thrived at Holland High School, leading her class as a sophomore and eventually graduating fifth as a senior. Art, English, and biology were her favorites. Sometimes she planned to become a physician, other times a medical illustrator.
Judith Jahns Aycock recalled that Aardsma loved the colorful English literature teacher Olin Van Lare, who was prone to bursting into tears during moving passages of poetry.
Teachers loved her in return. Verne C. Kupelian, a history teacher who later opened a teen dance club in Holland patronized by Aardsma and her friends, still cherishes a poem she wrote for him.
Dirk Bloemendaal Sr., who taught physiology, a senior-level biology course, recalled that Aardsma was a hard worker in a difficult class, where all students dissected cats.
"I think I ended up giving her a straight 'A' in the class, and it was not an easy class," he said. "She was really the kind of person you love to have in your class."
Aardsma hung out with a group of girls whose names appear in academic honors stories in the Sentinel from junior high through National Honor Society and graduation.
Her best friend was Jan Sasamoto Brandt, a Japanese-American girl whose parents had relocated to Holland from the West Coast during World War II, when many fellow Japanese-Americans on the coast were being interned in camps.
"She was artistic, and I was bright also. But I was more the serious bright and she was more artistic, so I think we balanced each other pretty well," Brandt said.
Aardsma had long reddish-brown hair and hazel eyes. She was 5 feet 8 inches tall, and slim. She was never short of male admirers, friends recalled, but she wasn't boy-crazy and never stayed with one for long.
Aardsma also had a dark side, sometimes seeming to foresee that her life would be unaccountably short.
A poem she wrote as a high school sophomore, "Why Do I Live?" was cited by her pastor at her funeral as evidence that she accepted God's will and embraced death.
'Kind of gutsy'
At some point in late high school or early college, Betsy Aardsma spent a week on a mission program run by the Reformed Church on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico and taught art to what were then called "ghetto" children in nearby Grand Rapids.
That is known from published reports after her death and confirmed by her former brother-in-law Dennis Wegner.
None of her immediate family would agree to interviews for this story. Her sister Carole, now a Reformed Church minister, commented only that, "I've said all I'm going to say." Her younger sister could not be reached.
But friends, teachers and more distant family members like Wegner opened up. Their recollections, along with information already in the public record, enabled this story to be written in detail.
Aardsma entered Hope College in the Honors Program in the fall of 1965, intending to pursue the pre-med program, which has always been one of Hope's strengths.
She would have preferred to start college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, according to Brandt, who spent all four years there. They even talked about rooming together.
But her family was a Hope College family -- in addition to her parents, her older sister, Carole, was a graduate, and her brother would eventually go. Betsy Aardsma finally agreed to go, too.
"When we came to Hope College, it was really strict," said Tamara Lockwood Quinn, who like Aardsma lived in Voorhees Hall. "Lights out at 9 o'clock, chapel three times a week."
Aardsma's freshman roommate was Linda DenBesten Jones of South Holland, Ill., who recalled her as friendly, accommodating to a fault, fascinating to talk to and perhaps an early feminist.
"She wanted to be a doctor. I think that's pretty feminist," Jones said. "I thought it was kind of gutsy to say you were going to be a doctor. I didn't know anybody else who was going to be a doctor. In the classes she was in, she was one of the few women in it."
Men found Aardsma intriguing, among them fellow Hope student George Arwady, the current publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper in New Jersey. He recalled being in an honors English class with her and dating her once, but he remembered little else about her.
Aardsma could hold her own in a conversation about just about anything.
"She was always into really deep things and then was just so creative," Margo Hakken Zeedyk said. "She had a real good sense of humor, but at the same time, it was a little dry. Real clever."
But not all her dates were as friendly as Arwady. Jones recalled one date that her mother told the state police about after Aardsma was killed, someone "who had kind of snarled at her one time in the dorm," Jones said. "I remember it. [Betsy] saw that as very sinister and scary. At the time, I thought, oh, come on, he's just kind of dramatic."
Aardsma did OK in pre-med classes, Jones recalled, but decided during that first year that her English classes were far more enjoyable than biology or chemistry.
After her sophomore year, for what her friends believe were academic and social reasons, Aardsma transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Putting dreams aside
When she arrived at Michigan in the fall of 1967, the campus was engulfed in the fervor of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The school had been known for its liberal politics through much of the decade. Students for a Democratic Society was organized there in 1960, and Michigan student Bill Ayers, who became a household name during the 2008 presidential campaign, was a leader of the group that fall.
Aardsma was more drawn to another organization that had a special connection to the University of Michigan, the Peace Corps.
President John F. Kennedy first talked about sending Americans to Third World countries to help fight poverty during an impromptu speech on the Michigan campus in 1960.
Aardsma would see in the Peace Corps a way to live out her desire to help the world's less fortunate.
She found herself somewhat lonely, however, when she first moved to Ann Arbor.
Even though her friend Jan Sasamoto Brandt was there, Brandt was in a sorority, and the two had started to drift apart during the two-year separation. Aardsma missed her Holland friends but kept in touch through the mail.
"Intellectually, this place is not as alive as it should be," she complained in a letter in September 1967 to high school friend Phyllis "Peggy" Wich Vandenberg, who was at Marquette University in Wisconsin. "I run into asses every day."
But she also encountered "a good number of acutely aware people" and was happy that no matter the type of person, U of M had a lot of them.
In her senior year, she shared an apartment with three other women. It was below an apartment shared by four members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.
One of them was David L. Wright, a son of a psychiatrist from Elmhurst, Ill. Wright, a senior, was pre-med. They had met as juniors, but now their friends pushed the relationship.
Provided photo Betsy Aardsma's boyfriend at the time of her death was David L. Wright, now a physician in Rockford, Ill.
"She was just a very brilliant person, extremely smart," said Wright, now a kidney specialist in Rockford, Ill. "Good sense of humor. Just a wonderful person."
As happy as Betsy Aardsma was that final spring in Ann Arbor, she was among many women on campus worried by slayings taking place around them.
Serial killer John Norman Collins, now serving a life term at a prison in Michigan, had resumed killing women in March 1969. Police believe he killed at least four women between March and July 1969.
He was tried and convicted in the summer of 1970 for the last murder, that of Karen Sue Beineman of Grand Rapids.
Meanwhile, Aardsma's boyfriend, Wright, became one of 64 people accepted into the third class at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, which had opened in the fall of 1967.
Aardsma graduated from Michigan with "distinction and honors" in English. But as much as she cared for Wright, she still wanted to join the Peace Corps and go to Africa for a year. She applied and was accepted, according to Wright and Brandt.
It made for an unhappy summer in Holland.
Aardsma initially told Brandt she wouldn't be able to be in her wedding that August because she expected to be shipped off to Africa by then.
That was before Wright decided he wasn't crazy about the idea of his girlfriend going away for a year.
"She asked if I would wait for her and so forth," Wright said. "And I sort of selfishly said, I just don't know what will happen."
Aardsma canceled her Peace Corps plans and decided to follow Wright to Pennsylvania. She enrolled at Penn State, although the graduate English program was at the main campus in State College, nearly a hundred miles from his med school in Hershey.
She put her dreams aside and focused on a career as a teacher -- albeit at the college level -- like her sister Carole and her mother.
Because of the ongoing killings, her family was relieved she was getting out of Ann Arbor.
"When she moved to Penn State, we thought, oh, thank God, she's at a place where she's safe, not out at the University of Michigan," said Wegner, her former brother-in-law.
Anyway, here is the article, lots of info, and again, pardon me if it has been posted...I also have to continue it in my next post as article is overlimit for posting...
by DAVID DeKOK, Of The Patriot-News Sunday December 07, 2008, 12:01 AM
The Patriot-NewsA newspaper clipping from 1969 describes the investigation into the death of Betsy Aardsma, which remains unsolved.
They are old men now, long retired from the state police, but they can't forget a slaying they never solved. They are haunted by the memory of Betsy Aardsma, a woman from Holland, Mich., who on Nov. 28, 1969, lay dead before them on a gurney in a hallway of Ritenour Student Health Center at Penn State University.
"When I retired from the state police, I went to Arizona, but I never let it go," said Ron Tyger, 69, one of the original investigators.
See David DeKok's video on the mystery of Betsy Aardsma.
Aardsma was stabbed once in the chest while doing research in the cramped and dimly lit stacks of Pattee Library. As she slumped to the floor, pulling books down on top of herself, her killer pulled out the knife and fled into the night.
Between 30 and 40 state troopers worked on the case, interviewing hundreds of students and following leads around the country, especially to Michigan.
Nothing came of their efforts. And it disturbs them.
"I know these guys want me to solve this," said Trooper Kent Bernier, the current investigator, who at age 40 was born the year before the killing. "They talk to me about it regularly.
"It means a lot to them because it was a case that hit them square in the face back then. And it's never going to let me go, either," Bernier said.
Betsy Aardsma's friends and teachers said she was among the best America had to offer in the late 1960s.
Artistic and poetic, imbued with liberal ideals and empathy for the underprivileged, she planned to join the Peace Corps after graduating with honors from the University of Michigan in 1969.
But her boyfriend, David L. Wright, wouldn't promise to wait for her, so she dropped those plans and followed him to central Pennsylvania.
Wright began classes at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, while Aardsma enrolled in the graduate English program at Penn State's main campus, taking the bus to Harrisburg on weekends.
She perished in one of the bloodier years of the 1960s, when the Manson family and the Zodiac killer were attacking in California and an unknown serial killer was murdering women around the University of Michigan.
Aardsma's family were relieved she was leaving Ann Arbor. They thought State College would be safe.
Instead, they were about to enter a nightmare that has lasted four decades.
Bright and popular
Betsy Aardsma was like many other women in small towns across America when she came of age in the mid-1960s.
Intrigued by the larger world, wanting a life of the mind and a life of helping others, she was unsure about being a traditional wife and mother.
Her hometown was founded by Calvinist religious dissidents from the Netherlands in 1847 and was known for being conservative and insular. As the local saying went, "if you're not Dutch, you're not much." It was half joke, half belief.
Provided photo Betsy Aardsma, second from right, graduated from high school in Holland, Mich., in 1965.
In the 1960s, Holland had about 25,000 people, predominantly descendants of those original settlers and many, like the Aardsmas, having Dutch names.
The city has two dominant religious denominations, the moderate Reformed Church and the ultraconservative Christian Reformed Church. Both believe God's will determines every event in life, good or bad. Humans are "predestined" at birth for heaven or hell.
Betsy Aardsma's pastor at Trinity Reformed Church told mourners at her funeral that her killing was "God's will," according to one of her friends who was there.
Richard and Esther Aardsma, Betsy's parents, were graduates of Hope College, a Reformed Church liberal arts college in Holland. He worked as a sales tax auditor for the Michigan Treasury Department, and she was a homemaker and former teacher.
The Aardsmas were a solidly middle-class couple, raising their four children in a house on leafy West 37th Street in Holland. Betsy was the second-oldest.
Betsy thrived at Holland High School, leading her class as a sophomore and eventually graduating fifth as a senior. Art, English, and biology were her favorites. Sometimes she planned to become a physician, other times a medical illustrator.
Judith Jahns Aycock recalled that Aardsma loved the colorful English literature teacher Olin Van Lare, who was prone to bursting into tears during moving passages of poetry.
Teachers loved her in return. Verne C. Kupelian, a history teacher who later opened a teen dance club in Holland patronized by Aardsma and her friends, still cherishes a poem she wrote for him.
Dirk Bloemendaal Sr., who taught physiology, a senior-level biology course, recalled that Aardsma was a hard worker in a difficult class, where all students dissected cats.
"I think I ended up giving her a straight 'A' in the class, and it was not an easy class," he said. "She was really the kind of person you love to have in your class."
Aardsma hung out with a group of girls whose names appear in academic honors stories in the Sentinel from junior high through National Honor Society and graduation.
Her best friend was Jan Sasamoto Brandt, a Japanese-American girl whose parents had relocated to Holland from the West Coast during World War II, when many fellow Japanese-Americans on the coast were being interned in camps.
"She was artistic, and I was bright also. But I was more the serious bright and she was more artistic, so I think we balanced each other pretty well," Brandt said.
Aardsma had long reddish-brown hair and hazel eyes. She was 5 feet 8 inches tall, and slim. She was never short of male admirers, friends recalled, but she wasn't boy-crazy and never stayed with one for long.
Aardsma also had a dark side, sometimes seeming to foresee that her life would be unaccountably short.
A poem she wrote as a high school sophomore, "Why Do I Live?" was cited by her pastor at her funeral as evidence that she accepted God's will and embraced death.
'Kind of gutsy'
At some point in late high school or early college, Betsy Aardsma spent a week on a mission program run by the Reformed Church on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico and taught art to what were then called "ghetto" children in nearby Grand Rapids.
That is known from published reports after her death and confirmed by her former brother-in-law Dennis Wegner.
None of her immediate family would agree to interviews for this story. Her sister Carole, now a Reformed Church minister, commented only that, "I've said all I'm going to say." Her younger sister could not be reached.
But friends, teachers and more distant family members like Wegner opened up. Their recollections, along with information already in the public record, enabled this story to be written in detail.
Aardsma entered Hope College in the Honors Program in the fall of 1965, intending to pursue the pre-med program, which has always been one of Hope's strengths.
She would have preferred to start college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, according to Brandt, who spent all four years there. They even talked about rooming together.
But her family was a Hope College family -- in addition to her parents, her older sister, Carole, was a graduate, and her brother would eventually go. Betsy Aardsma finally agreed to go, too.
"When we came to Hope College, it was really strict," said Tamara Lockwood Quinn, who like Aardsma lived in Voorhees Hall. "Lights out at 9 o'clock, chapel three times a week."
Aardsma's freshman roommate was Linda DenBesten Jones of South Holland, Ill., who recalled her as friendly, accommodating to a fault, fascinating to talk to and perhaps an early feminist.
"She wanted to be a doctor. I think that's pretty feminist," Jones said. "I thought it was kind of gutsy to say you were going to be a doctor. I didn't know anybody else who was going to be a doctor. In the classes she was in, she was one of the few women in it."
Men found Aardsma intriguing, among them fellow Hope student George Arwady, the current publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper in New Jersey. He recalled being in an honors English class with her and dating her once, but he remembered little else about her.
Aardsma could hold her own in a conversation about just about anything.
"She was always into really deep things and then was just so creative," Margo Hakken Zeedyk said. "She had a real good sense of humor, but at the same time, it was a little dry. Real clever."
But not all her dates were as friendly as Arwady. Jones recalled one date that her mother told the state police about after Aardsma was killed, someone "who had kind of snarled at her one time in the dorm," Jones said. "I remember it. [Betsy] saw that as very sinister and scary. At the time, I thought, oh, come on, he's just kind of dramatic."
Aardsma did OK in pre-med classes, Jones recalled, but decided during that first year that her English classes were far more enjoyable than biology or chemistry.
After her sophomore year, for what her friends believe were academic and social reasons, Aardsma transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Putting dreams aside
When she arrived at Michigan in the fall of 1967, the campus was engulfed in the fervor of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The school had been known for its liberal politics through much of the decade. Students for a Democratic Society was organized there in 1960, and Michigan student Bill Ayers, who became a household name during the 2008 presidential campaign, was a leader of the group that fall.
Aardsma was more drawn to another organization that had a special connection to the University of Michigan, the Peace Corps.
President John F. Kennedy first talked about sending Americans to Third World countries to help fight poverty during an impromptu speech on the Michigan campus in 1960.
Aardsma would see in the Peace Corps a way to live out her desire to help the world's less fortunate.
She found herself somewhat lonely, however, when she first moved to Ann Arbor.
Even though her friend Jan Sasamoto Brandt was there, Brandt was in a sorority, and the two had started to drift apart during the two-year separation. Aardsma missed her Holland friends but kept in touch through the mail.
"Intellectually, this place is not as alive as it should be," she complained in a letter in September 1967 to high school friend Phyllis "Peggy" Wich Vandenberg, who was at Marquette University in Wisconsin. "I run into asses every day."
But she also encountered "a good number of acutely aware people" and was happy that no matter the type of person, U of M had a lot of them.
In her senior year, she shared an apartment with three other women. It was below an apartment shared by four members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.
One of them was David L. Wright, a son of a psychiatrist from Elmhurst, Ill. Wright, a senior, was pre-med. They had met as juniors, but now their friends pushed the relationship.
Provided photo Betsy Aardsma's boyfriend at the time of her death was David L. Wright, now a physician in Rockford, Ill.
"She was just a very brilliant person, extremely smart," said Wright, now a kidney specialist in Rockford, Ill. "Good sense of humor. Just a wonderful person."
As happy as Betsy Aardsma was that final spring in Ann Arbor, she was among many women on campus worried by slayings taking place around them.
Serial killer John Norman Collins, now serving a life term at a prison in Michigan, had resumed killing women in March 1969. Police believe he killed at least four women between March and July 1969.
He was tried and convicted in the summer of 1970 for the last murder, that of Karen Sue Beineman of Grand Rapids.
Meanwhile, Aardsma's boyfriend, Wright, became one of 64 people accepted into the third class at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, which had opened in the fall of 1967.
Aardsma graduated from Michigan with "distinction and honors" in English. But as much as she cared for Wright, she still wanted to join the Peace Corps and go to Africa for a year. She applied and was accepted, according to Wright and Brandt.
It made for an unhappy summer in Holland.
Aardsma initially told Brandt she wouldn't be able to be in her wedding that August because she expected to be shipped off to Africa by then.
That was before Wright decided he wasn't crazy about the idea of his girlfriend going away for a year.
"She asked if I would wait for her and so forth," Wright said. "And I sort of selfishly said, I just don't know what will happen."
Aardsma canceled her Peace Corps plans and decided to follow Wright to Pennsylvania. She enrolled at Penn State, although the graduate English program was at the main campus in State College, nearly a hundred miles from his med school in Hershey.
She put her dreams aside and focused on a career as a teacher -- albeit at the college level -- like her sister Carole and her mother.
Because of the ongoing killings, her family was relieved she was getting out of Ann Arbor.
"When she moved to Penn State, we thought, oh, thank God, she's at a place where she's safe, not out at the University of Michigan," said Wegner, her former brother-in-law.