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Murder in the Stacks: Penn State, Betsy Aardsma, and the Killer Who Got Away

by David DeKok

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532491,233 (3.75)3
History. True Crime. Nonfiction. HTML:

On Nov. 28, 1969, Betsy Aardsma, a 22-year-old graduate student in English at Penn State, was stabbed to death in the stacks of Pattee Library at the university's main campus in State College. For more than forty years, her murder went unsolved, though detectives with the Pennsylvania State Police and local citizens worked tirelessly to find her killer. The mystery was eventually solved—after the death of the murderer. This book will reveal the story behind what has been a scary mystery for generations of Penn State students and explain why the Pennsylvania State Police failed to bring her killer to justice.More than a simple true crime story, the book weaves together the events, culture, and attitudes of the late 1960s, memorializing Betsy Aardsma and her time and place in history.

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This is a fascinating story of the murder of a 22-year-old graduate student in the stacks of the main Penn State University Library during Thanksgiving vacation in 1969. The author, who grew up in the same town as the victim, reconstructs the murder, describes the official attempts to solve the crime, analyzes why the murder was not solved by the officials and provides a biography of both the victim and the probable killer. Although the murder was never officially solved, both Derek Sherwood, who wrote Who Killed Betsy, an earlier account of the murder, and Mr. DeKok, a journalist, both identified the same man as the probable murderer, which was unofficially confirmed by the State Police in 2010. Mr. DeKok's book is well-written and well-researched with numerous endnotes and index; it is far superior to Mr. Sherwood's book which is not as well written and lacks endnotes and index. My only negative criticism of Murder in the Stacks is Mr. DeKok's indiscriminate use of the word "librarian," which he uses for practically anyone working in the library. ( )
  sallylou61 | Sep 6, 2014 |
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Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man’s life.

—Daniel Webster, 1830
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This is not a tidy true crime narrative of the sort in which a murder occurs, the police labor to solve it, and the murderer is tried and punished.
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History. True Crime. Nonfiction. HTML:

On Nov. 28, 1969, Betsy Aardsma, a 22-year-old graduate student in English at Penn State, was stabbed to death in the stacks of Pattee Library at the university's main campus in State College. For more than forty years, her murder went unsolved, though detectives with the Pennsylvania State Police and local citizens worked tirelessly to find her killer. The mystery was eventually solved—after the death of the murderer. This book will reveal the story behind what has been a scary mystery for generations of Penn State students and explain why the Pennsylvania State Police failed to bring her killer to justice.More than a simple true crime story, the book weaves together the events, culture, and attitudes of the late 1960s, memorializing Betsy Aardsma and her time and place in history.

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