Death in the College Library - 1969 - Pennsylvania

Now this one makes me think of the Zodiac bc of the CJB murder just 2-3 years earlier.  Anyone remember that Colarbomber mastermind Named Rothstein from PA?   Idkw but sometimes I've wondered if the zodiac had a similar profile to him.  Their handwriting and communication styles were so similar.  And their motivations.  At any rate, here is a thriller from PA where strange things happen - a thriller that is surprisingly similar to CJB case IMHO.  

"Death in the Stacks
Posted by Mark Gribben
There is irony in the fact that Betsy Aardsma left the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor — in 1969 the stalking grounds of a serial killer — for the relative safety of State College, Pennsylvania, only to be murdered on the campus of Penn State University.
To this day Betsy’s slaying remains an unsolved reminder that violence can find anyone at any time — even in the stacks of a college library.
It was just after Thanksgiving 1969 when Betsy Aardsma, a graduate student in English, was in Pattee Library working on a research paper for a literature class. A U of M graduate from Holland, Michigan, Betsy ended up at PSU not so much for the educational opportunity as for the chance to be near her college sweetheart who was attending medical school at another PSU campus. She had originally planned to join the Peace Corps as a teacher after graduating from Michigan but she opted to continue the relationship instead while keeping her goal of becoming a teacher.
Pattee Library was mostly empty at 4 p.m. on November 28, when the 22-year-old Betsy and her roommate arrived to do some research. Betsy was planning to meet later with the professor for whom she was writing the paper.
Betsy and the roommate, Sharon Brandt, agreed to meet again at 7 p.m. for dinner.
Those who saw Betsy that day all remember one unusual thing — she was rather overdressed for someone who was just going to peruse the books of the old masters in the dusty library stacks.
Betsy wore a sleeveless red dress over a white cotton turtleneck sweater.
“I didn’t know she was wearing that,” her friend Linda Marsa told The Patriot-News of Harrisburg. “That would have definitely been out of character for Betsy. She was pretty casual, if not necessarily hip in the way she dressed. A dress and white cotton shirt on a cold November day to do research in the stacks? That’s not normal.”
It is just idle speculation, however, to assume that Betsy was dressed up because she was going to meet someone other than her professor.
About a half-hour after the women arrived at the library Betsy was between rows 50 and 51 on the second level of the west wing of the library — an area known as “the core” — looking for a book; she was not alone in the area, according to the only witness who saw her at that time. There were also two men “talking quietly” in the stacks, Dean Burngart, a librarian, told police.
The stacks where Betsy died are typical for large school libraries. The space between rows is narrow, certainly not large enough for two people to pass unless one turns sideways. At the time Betsy was attacked, the shelving units extended to the wall which would make escape most likely impossible.
Fifteen minutes after he saw Betsy and the men on level 2, Burngart had moved up one level where he said he heard, through a floor vent, the sound of books falling.
Police later surmised that Burngart heard the books tumbling from the shelves that Betsy upset as she fell after being stabbed.
In a 1987 interview with the PSU newspaper, Burngart said he thinks the two men he saw near Betsy killed her.
“There was no one else in the core,” Burngart said. “In fact, the whole library was practically empty.”
Police estimated at the time of Betsy’s death there were just 90 or so people in the entire library, where on a normal day there would have been “hundreds.”
What was happening at the time Burngart heard the crash of the books is anyone’s guess. No one thought anything was amiss until at around 4:45 p.m. a man emerged from the core and said to several students, “Somebody better help that girl.”
Other witnesses said that there were two men who alerted the students.
Because Burngart was not aware of anything happening on the floor below him, and did not know of the murder until he arrived home that night, whether the two men who called for help are the same ones that he saw is unknown.
At first no one realized that Betsy had been assaulted. Her red dress hid any blood stains, and there was no blood where she lay unconscious. The people who came to her aid assumed that she had collapsed because of epilepsy or some other health condition.
As a result the crime scene was severely tainted. Betsy’s body was moved by people trying to help her in the narrow confines of the bookshelves, and any physical evidence such as fingerprints was rendered useless.
Even the ambulance personnel were unaware that Betsy had been attacked. They assumed an epileptic seizure and transported her to a nearby hospital where the stab wound was discovered.
The confusion over the type of injury really didn’t matter, because the killer had struck an overwhelming death blow.
Betsy’s killer used a single-bladed knife with a blade between 3.5 and 4 inches long. It was a quick, blitz-style attack that caught Betsy off guard. She did not scream and there were no defensive wounds on her hands as if she had tried to ward off the blows.
With significant force, the blade was plunged through Betsy’s sternum deep into her chest, severing her pulmonary artery and striking her heart.
“The findings also suggest that the wound was inflicted with considerable force at the time of a face-to-face confrontation of the victim and the assailant, and that this weapon was held in the right hand of the assailant,” Centre County pathologist Dr. Thomas Magnani wrote in his autopsy report.
Magnani estimated that Betsy was dead within 5 minutes of the attack. There was no evidence of sexual assault.
The initial investigation centered on Betsy’s boyfriend at the time, in part because the killer managed to sever a vital blood vessel with surgical precision. Eventually the medical student was cleared of having anything to do Betsy’s murder.
At the peak of the investigation some 40 troopers were working on Betsy’s case. With no physical evidence, a badly disturbed crime scene, and virtually no witnesses, the police tried everything they could. They used hypnosis, polygraphs, sketch artists, and interviews — thousands of interviews.
Eventually one of the two men seen in the stacks came forward and was also cleared, but the other man was never found.
Detectives looked into Betsy’s background, hoping that something would stand out. They found nothing.
“She was so damn squeaky clean it was pathetic,” Pennsylvania State Trooper Ron Tyger told the Patriot-News.
As of today, the efforts of the of investigators who have worked on this murder have yet to turn up the one clue that will break open the case. Although the case is cold, it remains open and is occasionally reviewed by the Pennsylvania State Police."
http://malefactorsregister.com/wp/death-in-the-stacks/

To be fair - I believe Bundy admitted to being in the northeast (specifically Jersey Shore) area sometime in 1969.  Bundy drove a VW bug and would be fimiliar with the VW as happened in the CJB case when her assailant tampered with her VW engine.  And Bundy targeted those college aged girls.  Bundy however typically was known to
Sexually assault his victims and neither had been assaulted sexually - but CJB's killer did seem to gain a near sexual thrill by killing her. There is always a chance that in those cases he did as much as he could get off and didn't have the time to sexually assault them (and also the proper location). I've often wondered if CJB could have been a Bundy victim and not a Zodiac victim.  I lean more towards CJB being a Zodiac victim, but considering how "prolific" Bundy was and how he was a cross country killer I can't rule him out.

At any rate, this killer stabbed this girl in the red dress in a very brazen attack...In an open library! He wanted the attention for it putting up that big of a risk. I suppose perhaps that was part of his motivation which is very much so like Z.

I'm gonna read up more on this. For some reason it seems like it could be connected to another cold case I was studying a while back. I will have to dig through my old notebook and refresh my memory. Or maybe the Betsy Aardsma is actually the one I am thinking of.