Fireside After Dark, Episode 3: The Unsolved Murder of Betsy Aardsma

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:11]There are certain places where we naturally keep our guard up. A dimly lit parking garage, a deserted street late at night, a subway platform when you're the only one waiting for the next train.

[00:00:22]In those types of places and situations, it's normal to feel at least a little bit vulnerable. So instinctively we know to stay alert, to look over our shoulders, and to listen a little more closely. But a library, that's a place that's at least supposed to feel different, safe. It's the kind of place where you don't think twice about walking into a secluded aisle by yourself. And especially at a university campus library, at least on paper, it's supposed to be one of the safest places you can be. It's quiet, predictable, familiar. It's a place where students can disappear into their studies with the comfort of knowing they're surrounded by other like-minded people who are all simply there to learn. But those same reasons are exactly what makes this story so disturbing. Because on a freezing afternoon in November of 1969, inside Patty Library at Pennsylvania State University, a 22-year-old graduate student named Betsy Arsma was attacked in the middle of the day. Even with other students nearby, in a building full of witnesses, no one seemed to understand what had happened until it was too late. More than 50 years later, her murder remains unsolved. Welcome back to Fireside After Dark. Tonight, we're stepping into a college library through aisles of books to look at a case that still raises the same uncomfortable question. How can something happen in such a public place and leave behind so few answers?

[00:01:45]Before we get into what happened inside the library that day, it's important to spend a moment with the person at the center of the story. In 1969, Betsy Ardsma was 22 years old, a young woman at the beginning of her life. She grew up in Holland, Michigan, the second of four children in a close-knit family.

[00:02:01]The people who knew her best described her as a bright, thoughtful, and deeply kind young woman. She was someone with a presence that naturally drew people in.

[00:02:10]She loved literature, poetry, and art.

[00:02:13]She was an honor student, someone who genuinely loved learning. And after graduating from University of Michigan, she had moved her life to Penn State University to begin work on her master's degree in English. She was well on her way to building something. Not just an academic future, but a personal one, too. She was in a serious relationship with her boyfriend, David Wright, who was studying medicine at the Penn State Milton S Hershey Medical Center about 2 hours away. They were making plans and imagining the kind of life they might build once school was over, which makes what happened next even harder to understand. It was November 28th, 1969, the Friday after Thanksgiving. The campus of Penn State was quiet. Most students had left town to spend the holiday with their families. Betsy had spent Thanksgiving in Hershey with David, but she had come back to campus early. She had a paper due, and she wanted to try and get ahead. If she finished, she could at least enjoy the rest of the weekend without it hanging over her. It was a bitter, gloomy day, the kind of overcast late November afternoon that makes you want to stay at home in bed. Before leaving her dorm room, Betsy put on a red sleeveless dress, a sweater, and her winter coat.

[00:03:20]It seems like a small detail, but that red dress would become one of the most disturbing parts of this case. Sometime just after 400 p.m., she arrived at Patty Library. She checked the card catalog, wrote down a few numbers, and then made her way downstairs to level two. To understand what happened next, it helps to try and visualize what that space was like. This wasn't a bright open reading room. The aisles of books were dense, the ceilings were low, and the overhead fluorescent lights gave off that constant electrical hum. In fact, the bookshelves were packed so tightly together that the aisles were only about 3 ft wide. Two people could barely squeeze past each other without having to turn sideways. It was easy to lose your sense of direction down there.

[00:04:00]Every aisle looked nearly identical.

[00:04:03]Every turn led to another row of shelves.

[00:04:06]Sometime around 4:30 p.m., Betsy made her way into aisle 51, looking for a specific book she needed for her research. A few other students were scattered nearby studying, but in the aisle, Betsy was alone. Then, sometime between 4:30 and 4:45 p.m., a few of those students near the aisle heard the sound of books falling and hitting the floor. But to them, it wasn't necessarily alarming. In a library, books fall. Shelves get bumped. It could have been nothing. But one student remembered hearing something else immediately after the noise. Footsteps.

[00:04:39]Fast ones. Someone running through the aisle. Seconds later, people saw a young man in a khaki jacket jog out from the same area the noise came from. He approached the circulation desk near the exit. He didn't sound panicked. He wasn't frantic. According to witnesses, he calmly pointed back toward the shelves and said, "Somebody better help that girl." Then he turned, walked out the front doors of the library, and disappeared into the cold November afternoon. No one stopped him. No one thought to ask his name. At that moment, no one knew what had just happened. A few curious students and staff members made their way to aisle 51 and found Betsy lying on her back on the floor.

[00:05:20]She was surrounded by scattered books.

[00:05:22]And at first, it didn't even look like a crime scene. There wasn't any blood visible, and there were no obvious signs of a struggle. The aisle itself looked almost undisturbed, aside from the books that had fallen nearby. Someone knelt beside her and tried to help. Another person called for medical assistance.

[00:05:38]The immediate assumption, the only assumption that seemed to make sense, was that Betsy had suffered some kind of medical emergency. Maybe she had fainted. Maybe it was a seizure. Maybe her heart had given out. But no one was thinking about violence. When the campus physician arrived, the scene was already chaotic. People were trying to help, but only in ways they knew how. Because they believed Betsy had simply fainted. They moved her. They checked for breathing.

[00:06:04]Some even began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, trying to bring her back.

[00:06:08]And somehow, through all of it, no one realized what had actually happened. No one saw a weapon. And still, no one saw blood. It wasn't until Betsy was lifted onto a stretcher and rushed out of Patty Library to the campus health center that the truth was discovered. Once the nurses removed her winter coat and sweater, they found what everyone had missed. Betsy Ardsma hadn't fainted. She had been stabbed. It had been a single stab wound to her left breast with a blade between 3 and 4 in in length. The knife had severed her pulmonary artery and pierced the right ventricle of her heart. She never even had the chance to scream. There were no defensive wounds on her hands or arms. Investigators would later conclude that Betsy was likely attacked from behind with a single swift precise motion. The blade had caused such catastrophic internal bleeding that almost all of her blood pulled inside her chest cavity. And because she was wearing layers and her red sleeveless dress, the blood had been almost completely hidden. It explains why the attack itself went unnoticed.

[00:07:07]There was no noise, no obvious struggle, no visible panic, just the sound of books hitting the floor and then nothing.

[00:07:16]One moment she was standing in aisle 51 searching for a book and the next she was on the floor fatally wounded while the person responsible was already walking calmly out of the building. The investigation that followed was an absolute nightmare for the Pennsylvania State Police. By the time police understood they were dealing with a homicide, the scene in Isisle 51 had already been contaminated. Because everyone had assumed Betsy was experiencing a medical emergency, students, staff, and medical personnel had moved through the area freely. They had knelt beside her, touched her, shifted her body, walked back and forth through the narrow aisle trying to help.

[00:07:53]If there was a footprint, it was likely destroyed. If there was a dropped clue, like a button, hair fiber, even the murder weapon itself, it could have been kicked aside without anyone realizing it. And in one of the most frustrating details of the entire case, the janitorial staff, unaware that a murder had taken place, later cleaned the whole area. Whatever evidence may have been there, was gone. Investigators were left trying to solve a murder with almost nothing to work with. No weapon, no clear eyewitnesses, no fingerprints pointing to a suspect. The Pennsylvania State Police launched an enormous investigation. They interviewed thousands of students, faculty members, and university visitors. They retraced Bets's final movements minuteby minute.

[00:08:37]They tried to identify the young man in the khaki jacket, the one who had stopped at the circulation desk before disappearing. But he was never conclusively identified.

[00:08:46]Years passed. Then decades. The case slowly transformed from an active investigation into a cold case. It became a file revisited every few years.

[00:08:56]And over time, investigators explored every possibility. They examined whether Betsy had been specifically targeted or whether the attack had been random. They looked at known violent offenders. They looked into serial killers, even briefly considering Ted Bundy, but ruled him out. And yet, despite the lack of physical evidence, one name kept resurfacing. Not officially, not in an arrest report or a public indictment, but in the notes of detectives, in the work of investigative journalists, in quiet conversations among those who had spent years studying the case. a fellow Penn State graduate student, a man who was in Patty Library that day, a man whose behavior raised deeply troubling questions, Richard Hafner. Hafner was 25 years old at the time, a Penn State graduate student studying geology. By most accounts, he was exceptionally intelligent. But there was another side to him. Those who knew Hafner described someone who could be deeply unsettling.

[00:09:51]He reportedly struggled with explosive anger, particularly in his interactions with women. They described him as unpredictable, volatile, a person whose anger could surface quickly and sometimes without warning. He was known to carry small knives. Over the years, investigators and journalists began assembling the pieces that made Hafner impossible to ignore. First, he reportedly matched the general description of the young man seen leaving the library, the one witnesses remembered wearing a khaki jacket.

[00:10:19]Second, he knew Betsy. Their relationship wasn't close, but their paths had crossed. Some accounts suggest Hafner had shown interest in her, though Betsy was in a committed relationship with her boyfriend. And perhaps most importantly, Hafner was known to have been in Patty Library that same afternoon. None of that proves guilt.

[00:10:38]But when you begin layering on what people later said about his behavior, the picture becomes harder to dismiss, and over time, a theory began to emerge.

[00:10:47]Not an official conclusion, not something prosecutors could ever prove, but a theory that somewhere inside those narrow fluorescent lit aisles of books, Hafner encountered Betsy. Maybe he approached her. Maybe he tried to start a conversation. Maybe he pushed for something more. And maybe Betsy, bright, confident, and unwilling to entertain him, told him no. If that's what happened, investigators believe everything may have unfolded in seconds.

[00:11:16]in an aisle barely wide enough for two people to pass, there was nowhere to step away, nowhere to create distance, just shelves and books. What makes the suspicion around Hafner even more unsettling is that not long after Bets's murder, he abruptly left State College.

[00:11:31]As the years passed, his life appeared to unravel. He became the subject of serious allegations and misconduct claims that ultimately destroyed his professional career as a geologist and further fueled questions about what he may have been capable of. For many people who have spent years studying this case, Richard Hafner remains the most compelling suspect. They believe he may have been the man who walked calmly out of Patty Library that afternoon. But belief, even strong belief, isn't enough to prove guilt. The Pennsylvania State Police need something more concrete, something they can prove. There is no DNA to test, no murder weapon, no confession, and no piece of evidence strong enough to move suspicion into certainty. And because of that, more than half a century later, Betsy Ardsma's case remains officially unsolved. Richard Hafner was never charged in Betsy Arsma's murder. He was never formally named as a suspect by law enforcement, and in 2002, he died.

[00:12:26]Today, Patty Library looks different.

[00:12:28]It's been renovated. The layout has changed. The aisles of books have been reorganized.

[00:12:34]Isle 51, as it existed on that November afternoon in 1969, is gone. But students still move through the building the way students always have. They search for books, find quiet corners to study, rush between classes, and lose themselves in their own futures. And most of them have no idea what happened there. But for those who do know the story, it's difficult not to feel the weight of it.

[00:12:57]Betsy wasn't walking through a dangerous neighborhood. She wasn't alone late at night. She was doing something millions of students have done before and since.

[00:13:05]Researching a paper on a quiet afternoon in a university library, a place that should have been safe. Betsy Ardsma was just 22 years old when her life was taken. She was brilliant, thoughtful, and in love. Standing at the beginning of a life she had every reason to believe was waiting for her. And somewhere in that maze of narrow shelves in the span of a few seconds, all of it was taken away. Whoever did it stepped back out into the cold Pennsylvania air and disappeared into history, leaving behind no clear answers, only questions.

[00:13:36]The unsettling truth that remains is that sometimes the most enduring mysteries don't happen in dark alleys or isolated places. Sometimes they happen in the middle of ordinary life, suddenly, without warning, and without explanation.