The murder of Betsy Aardsma is an American murder case dating from November , in which a year-old graduate student was murdered by a single stab wound inside the Pattee Library at the Pennsylvania State University Penn State in University Park , Pennsylvania. Though Aardsma's murder remains officially unsolved , local investigative journalists and two independent authors have published testimony and reports which strongly indicate Penn State geology professor Richard Haefner may have been responsible for her death, [ 2 ] which has been described by one author as Pennsylvania's most infamous unsolved murder.
The evidence indicating Haefner's guilt of Aardsma's murder is circumstantial. Haefner was never charged with her murder.
He died in Elizabeth Ruth "Betsy" Aardsma [ 4 ] was the second of four children. As a child, Aardsma displayed a flair for art and poetry.
By adolescence, she had developed somewhat liberal ideals and displayed a concern for the underprivileged. Aardsma attended Holland High School and performed well academically, graduating with honors in Shortly after graduating from high school, Aardsma enrolled in Hope College in the fall of with aspirations to become a physician. In the fall of , Aardsma enrolled at the University of Michigan , studying art and English and sharing an apartment with three other female students.
By her senior year, she had begun dating a medical student named David Wright, who by all accounts was her first serious boyfriend. Upon graduation from the University of Michigan, Aardsma initially intended to join the Peace Corps and travel to Africa, although she opted to enroll at Pennsylvania State University Penn State when she discovered that Wright, her boyfriend, intended to study there and that he could not guarantee he would remain loyal to her if she traveled abroad for any significant length of time.
