I've spent the past two weeks reading through this thread, as well as "Murder in the Stacks." DeKok and Sherwood have both made good cases for Haefner and it seems a sure thing that he did it, but I can't shake Betsy's English 501 classmate Larry Maurer. We know Maurer was in the core that evening and he was identified as one of the suspicious men seen talking there. But if the other man was Rick Haefner, why didn't Maurer volunteer this info to the police during any one of the numerous interviews they conducted with him? The two were briefly roommates, but it doesn't seem as though they were especially close and surely, if law enforcement had homed in on him as a suspect and seemed dead-set on building a case for at least two years following the murder, wouldn't it make sense for Maurer to have given up Haefner as a possible POI?
Of course, Haefner is described as a repressed and tightly-wound individual. Perhaps Maurer didn't think his ex-roomie had it in him. But in what essentially amounts to a closed-room mystery, he would have known he was there, and that's not nothing. Opportunity is everything when it comes to crime and if the heat on Maurer was as serious as it appears to have been, it would have made a lot of sense to dime on Haefner.
There are other reasons why Maurer nags at me. He was, by the accounts of classmates, an odd duck himself and utterly fixated on Betsy, who had rejected his advances. He was known to have carried a knife and as a country boy and avid hunter, his knowledge of basic anatomy would have been refined enough to kill with a single wound. Plus there's the military angle: Maurer was active in ROTC and abruptly left Penn State after Betsy's murder to enlist in the army. A bayonet could have done the job Betsy's killer did on her, easy.
Haefner was a creep, there's no question about that. But he was also sloppy. In his one documented act of violence against women, he attacked a woman following a highly public argument in a liquor store parking lot. Granted, this was nearly 30 years later, but it's a far cry from the person who slipped a knife into Betsy Aardsma's heart without so much as a whisper. Plus he was a known pederast, having molested scores of boys dating back to his teen years. It's difficult to reconcile such proclivities with a killer who would grab a woman's chest from behind and stick a blade under her left breast. There's an undeniable sexuality to that, one at odds with what we know about Rick Haefner's inclinations and in that way, he reminds me of Arthur Leigh Allen, Robert Graysmith and Vallejo PD's suspect in the Zodiac murders, a series of a cruel blitz attacks on young couples in lovers' lanes, almost clinical in their detachment, and followed by taunting letters and ciphers. Allen was also a convicted pedophile who, like Haefner, had little to no sexual interest in women his own age.
Dekok speculates that Betsy suspected something was off about Rick Haefner, that she referred to Haefner's creepiness in phone calls and letters home, and that Rick was angry at having been spurned, seeking her to act as a "beard," career-obsessed as he was, and that he'd attempted to make this sort of connection with other women in the past. (None of whom he ever attacked, mind you.) Maybe she knew exactly what he was but, if that was the case, I'd imagine she would have told someone about it, even reported him to the proper authorities. (Betsy's sense of justice was incredibly strong.) But this never happened.
And still, we have Maurer, the weird classmate, with his dual obsessions with death and Betsy Aardsma, who was suspected by police and later "disappeared" (DeKok's word) into the army and, later, the National Security Agency. I have read numerous posts conjecturing that Betsy's murder was a thrill-killing, something akin to Leopold and Loeb (who, incidentally, also betrayed their own sexuality in their attempt to perpetrate the perfect murder.) This could be. But what if it was also practice? A dry run from a guy more accustomed to dressing deer than bayonetting guerrillas and who wanted to make his bones before shipping out to Saigon? And what if, in his choice of a victim, he too betrayed something damningly personal?
In the end, it was probably Haefner, and perhaps I'll feel even more certain when I finish the book. But for the reasons listed above, I can't shake Maurer.